LFTC - Letter From The Capitol

LFTC - Afghan War Disaster?

Author-journalist Ann Marlowe writes in a WSJ op-ed that we are courting disaster in Afghanistan.  She fingers the failure of Team Obama to prevent Hamid Karzai from winning a fraudulent election--the loser being a leader more honest and more -pro-US.  Also Team Obama is not getting the necessary Pakistani push against Taliban in Pakistan tribal areas.  Marlowe says that from 2002 - 2006 policy was mostly headed in the right direction, but now there is too much focus on the military and not enough on the civilian side.

LFTC - IRAQ: Still Vital

Henry Kissinger counsels keeping Iraq in our strategic calculus, as it is central to Mideast geopolitics & will remain so even after we withdraw troops....

LFTC - Tony Blair's Iraq War Defense

A WSJ editorial notes Tony Blair's stalwart defense of his decision to join the US & Australia n the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the WMD intel debacle; Blair noted that Saddam could have rapidly rebuilt his WMD programs had sanctions been lifted, and that a nuclear Iraq & Iran could well have been the Mideast regional future.  The WSJ reports on Blair's pointed responses:

LFTC - Afghan Strategies: An Expert Speaks

Author & Afghan expert Ann Marlowe has published several informative pieces on the situation inside Afghanistan, from a ground view: "Fighting a Smarter War in Afghanistan"; "Afghanistan's Economy Blooms"; "Smarter Than a Surge: What Afghanistan Really Needs".  She acutely assess the situation and finds many ways that our effort can be improved there, identifying major mistakes along the way (such as supporting Hamid Karzai after his fraudulent re-election, and failing to gather enough pertinent information to leverage our presence.  All three articles I highly recommend to LFTC readers.  (Our Afghanistan Ambassador expressed similar views in diplomatic cables, according to the New York Times.)

There are more articles on Afghanistan and other topics at Ann Marlowe's website.

LFTC - Beating the Doomsday Clock

Former Secretary of Defense Keith Payne, long a missile defense maven, dismantles the latest adjustment of the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  The clock was set on January 14, 2010 to 6 minutes before midnight, one minute earlier than during the Bush years and one minute later than the original 1947 setting.  The Doomsday Clock Timeline reveals that twice it was set at 2 minutes away (1949, when the Russians detonated their first atomic device & 1953, after the US tested the world's first hydrogen bomb).  Once it was set a 3 minutes away (1984, when Ronald Reagan allowed the Soviets to walk away from the negotiating tale, due to his refusal to pre-emptively abandon the US Euromissile deployment & thus accept the then-existing Soviet Euromissiles already in place).  Its earliest setting was 18 minutes in 1991, when the Cold War ended as the Soviet Union imploded.

A Weekly Standard piece notes that scientists foolishly speak as if scientific prowess equates to strategic acuity:

This is no doubt music to the ears of the atomic scientists, who feel themselves to be especially qualified to judge these matters.  But knowing in detail how the bomb works does not necessarily grant one any special insight into the complex geopolitics of nuclear posture, deployments, bargaining, and hosts of other issues.  To believe otherwise is a conceit that stretches back to Oppenheimer himself, but one that ignores the enormous gulf between technical proficiency—even scientific brilliance—and political wisdom.  It’s the job of statesmen, not scientists, to think through the latter, and they may not always come to the same conclusion.

Tellingly, Payne notes an unimpeachable source for the PR focus of the Clock, in its original setting:

The keepers themselves recognize the lack of precision underlying their showy claims: Kennette Benedict, publisher of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, apparently observed that the Doomsday Clock originally was set “at seven minutes to midnight because that’s where it would look best in a design sense.” One can only wonder: Where was the scientific substance in this aesthetically pleasing timekeeping?

Bottom Line.  Scientists often have high IQs to go with equally high Ego Quotients.  The Bulletin's Clock is set by dovish scientists who fear conservatives and worship liberals, and calibrate their clock accordingly.  The two, when combined, often yield (excuse the nuclear pun) low-yield foreign policy quotients.

LFTC - IRAN WMD Intel: NOW They Tell Us!

Amidst the "all Haiti + Massachusetts news all the time" sturm und drang of the past week is this little item that normally might have provoked more media interest:

The Washington Times reported that US intelligence now believes Iran NEVER STOPPED its nuclear weapons program.  The information is contained in a draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to be presented to the White House, in February at the earliest:.  The WT article offers a view on the new Iran intel posture:

Differences among analysts now focus on whether the country's supreme leader has given or will soon give orders for full-scale production of nuclear weapons.

The new consensus emerging among analysts in the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community on Iran's nuclear arms program is expected to be the highlight of a classified national intelligence estimate nearing completion that will replace the estimate issued in 2007.

The unclassified summary of the 2007 document said the U.S. intelligence community had "moderate confidence" that Iran's nuclear weapons work had halted in 2003. In a footnote, it stated that weapons development was defined as warhead design and not the enrichment of uranium, which has continued unabated contrary to the Iranian government's agreement not to develop uranium enrichment techniques outside International Atomic Energy Agency controls.

A senior U.S. military officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity last week revealed that the new argument among analysts is over Iran's decision to move forward with weaponization.

"There is a debate being held about whether the final decision has been made. It is fair to argue that the supreme leader has not said, 'Build a nuclear weapon.' That actually does not matter, because they are not at the point where they could do that anyway."

The officer, who is knowledgeable about operational matters and intelligence on Iran, said Iran's nuclear program is well-advanced and moving toward the point at which a weapon could be built.

"Are they acting as if they would like to be in a position to do what the supreme leader orders if he gives the thumbs up at some point down the road? The answer to that is indisputably yes," the officer said.

There is more Iran news.  Iran warned that it might strike at the more than 90 warships now patrolling the Persian Gulf, were it attacked.  Jordan's General Intelligence Department (GID) said that Iran was behind a failed attempt to assassinate Israeli diplomats; the attack was an ostensible retaliation for the killing of an Iranian scientist, which Iran blames on Israel & America.  (In reality, this seems a Reichstag fire ploy by the Iranian regime.)  Amidst all this, what does China do?  China urged more "flexibility" in considering stronger UN sanctions against Iran.  In a business-as-usual move, a German firm has signed a major natural gas equipment deal with Iran.

Retuers reports that Iran has formally notified the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it rejects parts of the deal the IAEA has offered Iran.  Iran has February plans: it will launch three new communication satellites; such launches serve also as ballistic missile tests applicable to military use.  The US, for its part, plans to test its Ground-based Midcourse Missile (GMD) interceptor in the Pacific Ocean in February; the test will mimic an Iranian missile aimed at the US.

Two Bush-43 public diplomacy senior officials urge a soft-power strategy to move the Iranian rulers toward less aggressive policies, coupled with stronger sanctions.

Bottom Line.  The November 2007 US NIE on Iran's nuclear program was, as critics then charged, a political document, authored by analysts who believe that a strike against Iranian nuclear facilities is more risky than reliance upon traditional deterrence of a nuclear-armed Iran.  This latest NIE, though apparently not politicized, comes with a President in power even less inclined to launch a preventive strike at Iran than his predecessor.  But Israel was never fooled, and the ball thus remains in Israel's court, as to whether a strike will be launched against Iran to delay its crossing the nuclear weapons threshold.

LFTC - Cellphones In Saudi: Kiddies Beware!

The UK's Mail Online reports that the Saudis have sentenced a 13-year-old girl to 90 lashes and two months in prison, for a truly heinous crime: taking a cellphone to school.  Chalk up another milestone for votaries of the Religion of Peace.

LFTC - IRAN Update: Opposition Intensifies, Regime strikes Back

The WSJ reports that the Obama administration is shifting its policy emphasis to reflect an emerging view that the Iranian regime is weaker than previously thought.  Team Obama doesn't support regime change, but it realizes that it is a real possibility.  A major Swiss commodities trading firm is suspending gasoline shipments to Iran, fearing US sanctions.  Stateside, a major federal court appellate case will address whether a major anti-regime group, the MKK, should remain designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO); the administration intends that the designation be kept, but security consultant James Zumwalt argues the label should not apply.

AEI Iran maven Ali Alfoneh sees opposition influence growing, and notes the five points set forth by opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi:

That's why the Islamic Republic's political leadership is bound to ignore opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi's five-point plan to solve the political crisis in the country: Responsible government, free and fair elections, freedom to political prisoners, freedom of the press, and the right to establish political parties.

Bottom Line.  American policy must put regime change first, sanctions second and quixotic negotiations third.

LFTC - Afghanistan/Iraq/Pakistan: Drone Dramas

Afghanistan/Iraq.  A New York Times front-pager details how intelligence gathered from drones is so voluminous that it swamps the ability of of analysts to process the data.  In 2008 a total of 24 years' Afghan + Iraq intel for one person to continuously watch was gathered, triple the 2007 total.  Thousands of analysts are digesting 24/7 data flows, and the Air Force is seeking advice from network television on how to process the flood:

So Cmdr. Joseph A. Smith, a Navy officer assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video intelligence, said he and other officials had climbed into broadcast trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tagged and retrieved highlight film.

“There are these three guys who sit in the back of an ESPN or Fox Sports van, and every time Tom Brady comes on the screen, they tap a button so that Tom Brady is marked,” Commander Smith said, referring to the New England Patriots quarterback. Then, to call up the highlights later, he said, “they just type in: ‘Tom Brady, touchdown pass.’ ”

Lt. Col. Brendan M. Harris, who is in charge of an intelligence squadron here, said his analysts could do that. He said the Air Force had just installed telestrators on its latest hand-held video receiver, and harried officers in the field would soon be able to simply circle the images of trucks or individuals they wanted the drones to follow.

But Colonel Harris also said that the drones often shot gray-toned video with infrared cameras that was harder to decipher than color shots. And when force is potentially involved, he said, there will be limits on what automated systems are allowed to do.

“You need somebody who’s trained and is accountable in recognizing that that is a woman, that is a child and that is someone who’s carrying a weapon,” he said. “And the best tools for that are still the eyeball and the human brain.”

A WSJ editorial sees drone strikes as enabling targeting terrorist leaders while minimizing collateral casualties.  Team Obama's drone record is indeed impressive:

Though you won't hear him brag about it, President Obama has embraced and ramped up the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. As tactic and as a technology, drones are one of the main U.S. advantages that have emerged from this long war. (IEDs are one of the enemy's.) Yet their use isn't without controversy, and it took nerve for the White House to approve some 50 strikes last year, exceeding the total in the last three years of the Bush Administration.

From Pakistan to Yemen, Islamic terrorists now fear the Predator and its cousin, the better-armed Reaper. So do critics on the left in the academy, media and United Nations; they're calling drones an unaccountable tool of "targeted assassination" that inflames anti-American passions and kills civilians. At some point, the President may have to defend the drone campaign on military and legal grounds.

The case is easy. Not even the critics deny its success against terrorists. Able to go where American soldiers can't, the Predator and Reaper have since 9/11 killed more than half of the 20 most wanted al Qaeda suspects, the Uzbek, Yemeni and Pakistani heads of allied groups and hundreds of militants. Most of those hits were in the last four years.

"Very frankly, it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership," CIA Director Leon Panetta noted last May.

Pakistan.  The WSJ editors rebut critics who complain of excessive collateral civilian casualties (who, to be fair, include top counter-insurgency expert Dave Kilcullen, former adviser to the US forces in Iraq.  Relying on local, who may well be either Taliban or sympathizers of same, is very dicey.  Save for small children, one cannot determine, in a war without uniforms, who is a combatant or supporter of combatants versus who is not.

Bottom Line.  Drone killings exemplify the benefits of precision-munition warfare: targeting terrorists as narrowly as feasible, short of rifles.  To allow critics to take away this valuable weapon would be catastrophic.

LFTC - Stratfor: Afghan Base Assassination of CIA Operatives

The following excellent essay by Statfor co-founder George Friedman on the suicide bombing assassination of top CIA operatives in Afghanistan is reprinted by permission from Stratfor:

The Khost Attack and the Intelligence War Challenge

By George Friedman and Scott Stewart

As Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi exited the vehicle that brought him onto Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30, 2009, security guards noticed he was behaving strangely. They moved toward al-Balawi and screamed demands that he take his hand out of his pocket, but instead of complying with the officers’ commands, al-Balawi detonated the suicide device he was wearing. The explosion killed al-Balawi, three security contractors, four CIA officers and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID) officer who was al-Balawi’s handler. The vehicle shielded several other CIA officers at the scene from the blast. The CIA officers killed included the chief of the base at Khost and an analyst from headquarters who reportedly was the agency’s foremost expert on al Qaeda. The agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan was allegedly among the officers who survived.

Al-Balawi was a Jordanian doctor from Zarqa (the hometown of deceased al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Under the alias Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani, he served as an administrator for Al-Hesbah, a popular Internet discussion forum for jihadists. Jordanian officers arrested him in 2007 because of his involvement with radical online forums, which is illegal in Jordan. The GID subsequently approached al-Balawi while he was in a Jordanian prison and recruited him to work as an intelligence asset.

Al-Balawi was sent to Pakistan less than a year ago as part of a joint GID/CIA mission. Under the cover of going to school to receive advanced medical training, al-Balawi established himself in Pakistan and began to reach out to jihadists in the region. Under his al-Khurasani pseudonym, al-Balawai announced in September 2009 in an interview on a jihadist Internet forum that he had officially joined the Afghan Taliban.

A Lucky Break for the TTP

It is unclear if al-Balawi was ever truly repentant. Perhaps he cooperated with the GID at first, but had a change of heart sometime after arriving in Pakistan. Either way, at some point al-Balawi approached the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the main Pakistani Taliban group, and offered to work with it against the CIA and GID. Al-Balawi confirmed this in a video statement recorded with TTP leader Hakeemullah Mehsud and released Jan. 9. This is significant because it means that al-Balawi’s appearance was a lucky break for the TTP, and not part of some larger, intentional intelligence operation orchestrated by the TTP or another jihadist entity like al Qaeda.

The TTP’s luck held when a group of 13 people gathered to meet al-Balawi upon his arrival at FOB Chapman. This allowed him to detonate his suicide device amid the crowd and create maximum carnage before he was able to be searched for weapons.

In the world of espionage, source meetings are almost always a dangerous activity for both the intelligence officer and the source. There are fears the source could be surveilled and followed to the meeting site, or that the meeting could be raided by host country authorities and the parties arrested. In the case of a terrorist source, the meeting site could be attacked and those involved in the meeting killed. Because of this, the CIA and other intelligence agencies exercise great care while conducting source meetings. Normally they will not bring the source into a CIA station or base. Instead, they will conduct the meeting at a secure, low-profile offsite location.

Operating in the wilds of Afghanistan is far different from operating out of an embassy in Vienna or Moscow, however. Khost province is Taliban territory, and it offers no refuge from the watching eyes and gunmen of the Taliban and their jihadist allies. Indeed, the province has few places safe enough even for a CIA base. And this is why the CIA base in Khost is located on a military base, FOB Chapman, named for the first American killed in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. Normally, an outer ring of Afghan security around the base searches persons entering FOB Chapman, who the U.S. military then searches again at the outer perimeter of the U.S. portion of the base. Al-Balawi, a high-value CIA asset, was allowed to skip these external layers of security to avoid exposing his identity to Afghan troops and U.S. military personnel. Instead, the team of Xe (the company formerly known as Blackwater) security contractors were to search al-Balawi as he arrived at the CIA’s facility.

A Failure to Follow Security Procedures

Had proper security procedures been followed, the attack should only have killed the security contractors, the vehicle driver and perhaps the Jordanian GID officer. But proper security measures were not followed, and several CIA officers rushed out to greet the unscreened Jordanian source. Reports indicate that the source had alerted his Jordanian handler that he had intelligence pertaining to the location of al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. (There are also reports that al-Balawi had given his handlers highly accurate battle damage assessments on drone strikes in Pakistan, indicating that he had access to high-level jihadist sources.) The prospect of finally receiving such crucial and long-sought information likely explains the presence of the high-profile visitors from CIA headquarters in Langley and the station in Kabul — and their exuberance over receiving such coveted intelligence probably explains their eager rush to meet the source before he had been properly screened.

The attack, the most deadly against CIA personnel since the 1983 Beirut bombing, was clearly avoidable, or at least mitigable. But human intelligence is a risky business, and collecting human intelligence against jihadist groups can be flat-out deadly. The CIA officers in Khost the day of the bombing had grown complacent, and violated a number of security procedures. The attack thus serves as a stark reminder to the rest of the clandestine service of the dangers they face and of the need to adhere to time-tested security procedures.

A better process might have prevented some of the deaths, but it would not have solved the fundamental problem: The CIA had an asset who turned out to be a double agent. When he turned is less important than that he was turned into — assuming he had not always been — a double agent. His mission was to gain the confidence of the CIA as to his bona fides, and then create an event in which large numbers of CIA agents were present, especially the top al Qaeda analyst at the CIA. He knew that high-value targets would be present because he had set the stage for the meeting by dangling vital information before the agency. He went to the meeting to carry out his true mission, which was to deliver a blow against the CIA. He succeeded.

The Obama Strategy’s Weakness

In discussing the core weakness in the Afghan strategy U.S. President Barack Obama has chosen, we identified the basic problem as the intelligence war. We argued that establishing an effective Afghan army would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, because the Americans and their NATO allies lacked knowledge and sophistication in distinguishing friend from foe among those being recruited into the army. This problem is compounded by the fact that there are very few written documents in a country like Afghanistan that could corroborate identities. The Taliban would seed the Afghan army with its own operatives and supporters, potentially exposing the army’s operations to al Qaeda.

This case takes the problem a step further. The United States relied on Jordanian intelligence to turn a jihadist operative into a double agent. They were dependent on the Jordanian handler’s skills at debriefing, vetting and testing the now-double agent. It is now reasonable to assume the agent allowed himself to be doubled in an attempt to gain the trust of the handler. The Jordanians offered the source to the Americans, who obviously grabbed him, and the source passed all the tests to which he was undoubtedly subjected. Yet in the end, his contacts with the Taliban were not designed to provide intelligence to the Americans. The intelligence provided to the Americans was designed to win their trust and set up the suicide bombing. It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that al-Balawi was playing the GID all along and that his willingness to reject his jihadist beliefs was simply an opportunistic strategy for surviving and striking.

Even though encountering al-Balawi was a stroke of luck for the TTP, the group’s exploitation of this lucky break was a very sophisticated operation. The TTP had to provide valuable intelligence to allow al-Balawi to build his credibility. It had to create the clustering of CIA agents by promising extraordinarily valuable intelligence. It then had to provide al-Balawi with an effective suicide device needed for the strike. And it had to do this without being detected by the CIA. Al-Balawi had a credible cover for meeting TTP agents; that was his job. But what al-Balawi told his handlers about his meetings with the TTP, and where he went between meetings, clearly did not indicate to the handlers that he was providing fabricated information or posed a threat.

In handling a double agent, it is necessary to track every step he takes. He cannot be trusted because of his history; the suspicion that he is still loyal to his original cause must always be assumed. Therefore, the most valuable moments in evaluating a double agent are provided by intense scrutiny of his patterns and conduct away from his handlers and new friends. Obviously, if this scrutiny was applied, al-Balawi and his TTP handlers were still able to confuse their observers. If it was not applied, then the CIA was setting itself up for disappointment. Again, such scrutiny is far more difficult to conduct in the Pakistani badlands, where resources to surveil a source are very scarce. In such a case, the intuition and judgment of the agent’s handler are critical, and al-Balawi was obviously able to fool his Jordanian handler.

Given his enthusiastic welcome at FOB Chapman, it would seem al-Balawi was regarded not only as extremely valuable but also as extremely reliable. Whatever process might have been used at the meeting, the central problem was that he was regarded as a highly trusted source when he shouldn’t have been. Whether this happened because the CIA relied entirely on the Jordanian GID for evaluation or because American interrogators and counterintelligence specialists did not have the skills needed to pick up the cues can’t be known. What is known is that the TTP ran circles around the CIA in converting al-Balawi to its uses.

The United States cannot hope to reach any satisfactory solution in Afghanistan unless it can win the intelligence war. But the damage done to the CIA in this attack cannot be underestimated. At least one of the agency’s top analysts on al Qaeda was killed. In an intelligence war, this is the equivalent of sinking an aircraft carrier in a naval war. The United States can’t afford this kind of loss. There will now be endless reviews, shifts in personnel and re-evaluations. In the meantime, the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan will be attempting to exploit the opportunity presented by this disruption.

Casualties happen in war, and casualties are not an argument against war. However, when the center of gravity in a war is intelligence, and an episode like this occurs, the ability to prevail becomes a serious question. We have argued that in any insurgency, the insurgents have a built-in advantage. It is their country and their culture, and they are indistinguishable from everyone else. Keeping them from infiltrating is difficult.

This was a different matter. Al-Balawi was Jordanian; his penetration of the CIA was less like the product of an insurgency than an operation carried out by a national intelligence service. And this is the most troubling aspect of this incident for the United States. The operation was by all accounts a masterful piece of tradecraft beyond the known abilities of a group like the TTP. Even though al-Balawi’s appearance was a lucky break for the TTP, not the result of an intentional, long-term operation, the execution of the operation that arose as a result of that lucky break was skillfully done — and it was good enough to deliver a body blow to the CIA. The Pakistani Taliban would thus appear far more skilled than we would have thought, which is the most important takeaway from this incident, and something to ponder.

LFTC - Afghan Base CIA Bomber: Obama's Other Intel Mess

Author Gerald Posner offers clues suggesting that the Jordanian suicide bomber who killed seven CIA top operatives in Afghanistan was aided by Islamist elements within Pakistani intelligence.  (I erroneously reported that the Jordanian had been one fo the agents killed, when in fact he was the double-agent killer.)  Posner recounts Byzantine intrigue among CIA, Afghan & Pakistani intel operatives.  At gut level it seems that the locals, with less scruples & ore knowledge, have a leg up.  Not good news.

Ex-CIAer Reuel Marc Gerecht sees a collapse of CIA tradecraft in the successful assassination; conversely, he sees solid tradecraft from al-Qaeda.  He sees unusual skill in their operation, but notes that standard practice of screening turned agents and of limiting exposure of top agents in a single location were ignored.

A Washington Post front-pager provides the latest details on the Chapman Base attack:

The Jordanian doctor arrived in a red station wagon that came directly from Pakistan and sped through checkpoints at a CIA base in Afghanistan before stopping abruptly at an improvised interrogation center. Outside stood one of the CIA's top experts on al-Qaeda, ready to greet the doctor and hear him describe a way to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organization's No. 2 and a man long at the top of U.S. target lists.

The Jordanian exited the car with one hand in his pocket, according to the accounts of several U.S. officials briefed on the incident. An American security guard approached him to conduct a pat-down search and asked him to remove his hand. Instead, the Jordanian triggered a switch.

A sharp "CLMMMP" sound coincided with a brief flash and a small puff of smoke as thousands of steel pellets shredded glass, metal, cement and flesh in every direction.

A moment that CIA officials in Washington and Afghanistan had hoped would lead to a significant breakthrough in the fight against al-Qaeda instead became the most grievous single blow against the agency in the counterterror war.

Virtually everyone within sight of the suicide blast died immediately, including the al-Qaeda expert, who led the CIA team at the base; a 30-year-old analyst; and three other officers. Also killed were two American security guards contracted by the agency, a Jordanian intelligence officer and the car's driver. At least six others standing in the carport and nearby, including the CIA's second in command in Afghanistan, were wounded by pellets that had first perforated the vehicle.

The WP story cites multiple sources that confirm Gerecht's assessment, even given updated information:

Those at the scene on Dec. 30 had been trying to strike a balance between respect for their informant -- best demonstrated, in the regional tradition, by direct personal contact -- and caution, illustrated by the attentiveness of the security guards, according to CIA officials.

But more than a dozen current and former government officials interviewed for this article said they could not account in full for what they called a breach of operational security at the base in Afghanistan's Khost province. Advance pat-downs and other precautions are common in an age of suicide bombers, and meetings are kept small and remote. None of these sources would agree to be identified by name, in many cases because of their former or current work as covert operatives.

Several intelligence sources said the principal mistake was in trusting the bona fides of the Jordanian doctor, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who had never previously been invited to the base. The meeting was arranged with help from the Jordanian officer, who was among those waiting at the site for Balawi to arrive and was killed.

"You get somebody who has helped you and is incredibly important for the information he's going to potentially provide -- these are prize possessions," said a former CIA field officer. "Somebody comes, and it's like a celebration that they're coming. It's good to make them feel welcome. It's good to make them feel important."

The man who would prove to be a deadly attacker, the former officer said, "was heralded as a superstar asset. . . . So you get an important visitor coming. So you go out and meet him. . . . Is it bad tradecraft? Of course."

CIA Director Leon Panetta defended the performance of the CIA operatives killed in the Chapman Base bombing.  He rejected the tradecraft arguments.

Bottom Line. Whether tradecraft was flawed or not, the ability of al-Qaeda to penetrate a forward base in a theater of war and kill several top intelligence operatives is deeply disturbing.  And if Panetta is right, it is even more disturbing.  A failure of tradecraft is, presumably, readily correctable.  But a successful attack mounted in the face of proper tradecraft is harder to see being prevented next time.

LFTC - Obama, Israel & the Settlements Freeze

Hudson co-founder Max Singer authored an exceptionally good article explaining Israeli PM Netanyahu's decision to accept a 10-month partial freeze on West Bank settlements.  In short, Netanyahu calculated that he could accept a limited freeze, play for time, and still oppose the disastrous total freeze Team Obama wants.  This avoided an early open break with America.  And if Iran heats up, the Palestinian issue will be put in its proper place, near the bottom of Mideast problems to worry about.  Read Singer's excellent piece.

LFTC - IRAN 2010: Year of Decision

The Huffington Post offered the most electrifying report of 2009: the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has readied his jet to flee to Russia if necessary.  The Times of London suggests that revolution may indeed be in the air, and offers the key factor:

Once a regime has lost the support of its police and armed forces, revolution is almost inevitable. Marcello Caetano, the successor of the Antonio Salazar, Portugal’s long-time dictator, attempted to prolong his fascist rule and grip on overseas colonies but when the monocled head of the Army, General Antonio de Spinola, wrote a book suggesting that the policy was untenable, the regime’s military underpinning was shattered. In 1974 revolution swept the country and the police did nothing to halt it.

The Tehran killings of Sunday, December 28 raised confrontation between regime and opposition to a new level, as the dead protesters included the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.  Of particular import is that protesters in the increasingly violent confrontations are no longer calling for an honest election count, but instead call for death to their oppressors and an end to the regime.  The regime responded by arresting prominent opposition figures.  

Iran's activities in 2009 accomplished one thing: It proved what serious damage the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) did to American efforts to stop Iran's drive for nuclear club membership.  Repudiated within months by three foreign governments (UK, France, Israel), the NIE was a blatantly political document, designed to undercut Team Bush in its final year.  It was, put simply, prepared by intelligence and State Dept. officials who were prepared to deal with a nuclear Iran.

In December the House of Representatives punctuated the repudiation of the NIE by passing 412-12 the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act.  Team Obama responded by urging the Senate to delay passage, in favor of pursuing additional diplomacy--despite even Hillary acknowledging zero progress in negotiations this year.  RFE/RFL interviewed Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) re Iran; Lieberman hopes for quick sanctions action early next year.

The administration is preparing targeted sanctions to be implemented after the Dec. 31 deadline passes.  According to the Washington Post:

Sanctions would probably be imposed in three ways -- at the U.N. Security Council, with like-minded countries and unilaterally -- and U.S. officials would pursue them more or less simultaneously, with initial emphasis on pressing forward at the United Nations in February. France, an advocate of firmer pressure on Iran, will hold the rotating chairmanship of the Security Council that month.

During the George W. Bush administration, the Security Council thrice imposed relatively mild sanctions on Iran for its failure to heed calls to halt uranium enrichment. Those efforts also largely targeted elite parts of the government, but concern about not harming ordinary Iranians has been heightened by the rise of a nascent opposition movement, diplomats said.

The precise contours of the administration's sanctions policy are still being decided, but high on the list of targets is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the arm of the military that has been centrally involved in the attacks on demonstrators and that is playing an increasingly bigger role in Iran's economy. In 2007, the Bush administration cited the Revolutionary Guard and a group of front companies for their links to terrorism and proliferation -- including a major contractor known as Khatam al-Anbiya that channeled billions of dollars a year to the Guard from its activities in oil, construction, transportation and other industries.

The increasingly central role of the Revolutionary Guard in both the economy and the protests, officials said, makes it a target of possible resentment among the Iranian public -- and for tough U.S. sanctions. But officials insist that sanctions would not be linked to the protests. "It is only coincidental that at the same time we reached the deadline, the Iranian government has a bloody crackdown," said a third U.S. official. "It has only served to highlight the nature of the regime."

After Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the highest-ranking Republican retained by Obama is Treasury Undersecretary Stuart A. Levey, who spearheaded Bush's targeting of the Guard and nine of its front companies. Now Levey and his team have identified additional front companies, all of which could be targets for action.

But Ralph Peters notes that the end-2009 deadline for Iranian compliance with international rules has now expired, and wonders if the mullahs even worry over what Obama will do:

This is another debacle of Obama's own making. It's a fundamental rule of playgrounds and security policy that you shouldn't make threats you can't or won't back up. But Obama's in love with the sound of his own voice. The fanatics in Tehran are more interested in the sound of a nuclear blast.

Desperate leftists in our country still compare Obama to Bush, insisting that, well, Obama's not doing so badly, not really, not if you really think about it.

Bush, for all his faults, worried our enemies. Obama amuses them.

Obama's primary threat against the Tehran thugs has been sanctions. OK, let's see if he can get internationally recognized sanctions that actually bite. I'm offering 100-to-1 odds in Tehran's favor.

Iran, for its part, warned the Western powers that unless its own counter-offer is accepted by the end of January it will produce medical-grade uranium (19.75$ enriched, vs. 3.5% for commercial fuel) on its own.

Charles Krauthammer sees feckless appeasement in Team Obama's ignoring the rising protest movement whilst continuing to try, despite massive evidence of futility, to engage a clerical fascist regime Hell-bent on nuclear status.  Senator Kerry wants to go to Tehran, which as the WSJ editors note would empower the clerics and discredit opponents.  Robert Kagan warns that Team Obama is ignoring the resurgent big-power rivalry and the rise of autocracies with divergent national interests, in favor of utopian dreams.  Richard Perle charts the many dreams of President 44, and hopes he wakes up in time to protect us from serious harm.  Bill Kristol makes hash of 44's platitudes about history being on democracy's side, noting the totalitarian revolutionary triumphs of 1917 (Russia), 1933 (Germany), 1949 (China) and 1979 (Iran).

The Washington Post reported that Iran is mastering all aspects of nuclear weapons production:

The internal documents and expert analysis point to a growing Iranian mastery of disciplines including uranium metallurgy, heavy-water production and the high-precision explosives used to trigger a nuclear detonation. Although U.S. spy agencies have thought that Iran's leaders halted research on nuclear warheads in 2003, European and Middle Eastern analysts point to evidence that Iran has continued to hone its skills, as recently as 2007....

Iranian scientists must still rely on outsiders for certain components and materials, such as high-strength metals used in making advanced centrifuges and longer-range missiles. But the remaining technical gaps are shrinking, according to an internal memo drafted by top Iran analysts at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog. Excerpts from the never-published draft were leaked to a nonprofit group in October.

"Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device," the memo states.

There is more, too, as to "heavy water" activities:

In late October, IAEA inspectors who visited Iran for a first look at the secret plant also made a surprise discovery of 600 barrels of heavy water, a toxic liquid used in making plutonium, during a routine visit to one of Iran's lesser-known nuclear facilities near the city of Isfahan.

A recent IAEA report called on Iran to "provide information on the origin" of the heavy water.

"It was a complete surprise," said a European diplomat who agreed to talk about the internal debate on the condition of anonymity. "We assumed that the Iranians had purchased it from elsewhere, but no one really knew. No one believes they could have made it at the existing plant" -- a small facility at Khonab that has been mostly idle since it opened three years ago.

There is more in this superlative WP article, as to importing high-speed cameras from Russia, which can film sequences and thus aid in designing an effective triggering device, and as to Russian detonator experts visiting Iran in 2003--the very year that the 2007 NIE asserts Iran stopped its weapons design program.  (The New York Times article on the captured Iranian weapon design document is far more limited and tentative than the WP version, and rings less plausible given Iran's activities.)

Meanwhile, Iran recently tested its most advanced solid-fuel missile, with range sufficient to reach Israel and part of southern Europe.  On Dec. 20 ABC News This Week Sunday, top Obama adviser David Axelrod told George Stephanopoulos: "No one has any illusions about what the intent of the Iranian government is."  (In case anyone at Team Obama HQ does, this op-ed by the Marine commander of the Beirut barracks that was bombed Oct. 24, 1983 tells us that those who masterminded the operation are now senior Iranian defense officials.)

Claudia Rosett writes on how Iran is circumventing sanctions globally.  AEI's foreign policy VP, Danielle Pletka, explains why a nuclear Iran could not be contained.  A warning shot across the bow came when, on December 18, Iranian forces crossed into Iraq and seized an oil well located on disputed border territory.  Stratfor co-founder George Friedman called this a signal that Iran will not sit passively should stronger sanctions our military options be implemented (video clip, 5:15).  If this is how a non-nuclear Iran acts, what can one expect from a nuclear Iran?  One incitement to Iran going nuclear is Team Obama's aim to sharply cut and ultimately phase out America's nuclear arsenal, which has generated strong push-back from senior national security officials throughout the administration.

Alas, the Pentagon announced recently that a 15-ton bunker-buster superbomb slated for operational status June 2010 is now delayed to December 2010.  The six-month delay in readiness for the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) could be crucial, given Iran's timeline for attaining nuclear critical status, but then again no one believes that 44 will order a strike on Iran's facilities.

On the plus side, Gen. David Petraeus noted that the United Arab Emirates could take out the entire Iranian Air Force with its fleet of 70 Block 60 F-16s.  (The UAE's F-16s are the most advanced models, giving them better F-16s than US pilots fly!)  An even bigger possible plus: one opposition leader predicts the current government will not last the full four years.  The regime's recent admission that its jailers beat three demonstrators to death while in captivity was a further blow to its declining prestige.  Also on the plus side, soldier-blogger Michael Totten notes that Sunni Arabs now care more about stopping a nuclear Iran than they care about the Arab-Israeli conflict; this is a reality that eludes America's foreign policy establishment. Evidence for this: Daniel Pipes points to growing common sense in Egypt & Saudi Arabia, in polls showing fear of a nuclear Iran trumping Israel as an issue. 

But even on the plus side there is now a major minus: On Dec. 20 the Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri died at age 87; even before the June 2009 protests, he was the leading clerical figure in Iran, with prestige exceeding that of the Islamist regime's Supreme Guide, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  This New York Times story gives excellent detail on Montazeri's career.  Con Coughin's WSJ op-ed details clerical opposition rising.  The Washington Post reports that among the protesters confronted with violence Sunday at demonstrations are three sons of the Ayatollah Khomeini.  As the New York Times story reported, Montazeri had been designated to succeed that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but the two had a falling out over Khomeini's increasingly brutal, repressive policies shortly (it was all of three months) before Khomeini departed this Earthly vale.  A more disastrous falling out, more ill-timed for world and Mideast peace over the past 20 years, can scarcely be imagined. 

Mideast maven Robin Wright sees a possible Berlin Wall Moment in the works inside Iran.  A WSJ editorial profiles a top dissident recently arrested by the regime.  A Daily Beast post recounts how the author's friend in Tehran simply disappeared.  Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Moussavi denounced the regime's latest crackdown and pledged his own life if need be, to see this through.

A professor of Iranian studies warns that economic distress may play a role comparable to that played at the expense of the Shah in 1979:

According to Transparency International, Iran is today one of the most corrupt economies in the world. It also has the ignominy of topping the list of all countries in terms of brain drain. Each year, between 150,000 and 180,000 of the country's best and brightest leave the country. The yearly cost to Iran for this brain drain alone is estimated to be almost equal to the yearly cost of the Iran-Iraq War, according to the World Bank.

Falling oil prices are now forcing the regime to reduce the almost $100 billion of subsidies it pays to keep quiet a discontent population. The reserves it accumulated when oil prices were $150 per barrel have long been squandered by Ahmadinejad on harebrained schemes like carelessly making loans to start businesses that ended up fueling a real estate bubble, rather than creating jobs.

But this inevitable reduction of subsidies is sure to further reduce the standards of living for the poor and middle classes. This will make the horizon grim for the triumvirate of Revolutionary Guard commanders, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad who now rule Iran.

A politically discontent population forced to experience an unexpected economic downturn was a key element of the recipe that overthrew the Shah from the Peacock Throne in 1979. Poetic justice that the same sudden change in the country's economic fortune—and even the same use of religious rites and rituals for political purposes that brought the clerics to power 30 years ago—is now coming back to haunt them.

Ex-CIAer Reuel Marc Gerecht cheers us by citing three "unstoppable" ideas Montazeri stood for:

Yet in the end Montazeri, who died last week at 87, caused, and will continue to cause, untold trouble for the regime. By the end of his life, he had come to represent the fusion of three unstoppable ideas: that the Islamic Republic as built by Khomeini and led by Khamenei is illegitimate; that only democracy can redeem the republic and save Islam as a vibrant faith capable of shaping society's mores; and that clerics who support Khamenei are intellectual dullards and moral reprobates. It was Montazeri's religious passion, his argumentative rigor, his common-man roots, and his courage that drove the regime nuts. His disciples are everywhere.

One dissident cleric predicts regime collapse in a Der Speigel interview.  Asia hand Selig Harrison sees ethnic unrest as the threat the mullahs fear most, but sees the West unwilling to play the card, lest it lose its hope for engaging Iran on the nuclear issue:

The biggest threat to the ruling ayatollahs and generals in multi-ethnic Iran does not come from the embattled democratic opposition movement struggling to reform the Islamic Republic. It comes from increasingly aggressive separatist groups in Kurdish, Baluch, Azeri and Arab ethnic minority regions that collectively make up some 44 percent of Persian-dominated Iran’s population.

Working together, the democratic reform movement and the ethnic insurgents could seriously undermine the republic. But the reform movement, like most of the clerical, military and business establishment, is dominated by an entrenched Persian elite and has so far refused to support minority demands.

What the minorities want is greatly increased economic development spending in the non-Persian regions, a bigger share of the profits from oil and other natural resources in their areas, the unfettered use of non-Persian languages in education and politics and freedom from religious persecution. Some minority leaders believe these goals can be achieved through regional autonomy under the existing Constitution, but most of them want to reconstitute Iran as a loose confederation or to declare independence.

Meanwhile, the regime is becoming increasingly militarized.  But another Iran maven sees mercantilization more likely, supplemented by paranoia.  One huge point (if true), reported Dec. 31 on Fox's "America's Newsroom" show, by their London reporter Amy Kellog (someone who has always struck me as a sharp, solid tele-journalist): She said that some sources say that 50 percent of the Revolutionary Guard is leaning toward siding with the protesters.  If true, the regime's days may truly be numbered.  On "Fox News Sunday" Bill Kristol said that 2010 just might see the fall of the Iranian regime and its replacement by a regime less dangerous, and better disposed in towards the United States.

At "The National Interest" foreign policy maven Nicholas Gvosdev calls for supporting covert action against the Iranian regime.  He sees negotiation with no chance, economic sanctions unlikely to work due to lack of Allied cooperation, allies unwilling to do heavy lifting:

That leaves covert, paramilitary action. This requires good intelligence to pinpoint the location of sites critical to Iran’s nuclear program, and the teams and equipment necessary to infiltrate Iran and cause damage to the program, to either delay it or cause it to shut down altogether. But the administration has to be prepared for the risks and consequences of such a step. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards can accelerate their proxy attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq and Afghanistan, raising the costs for Obama’s team in both of these sensitive theaters of action. And Iran could easily escalate its mischief in the Persian Gulf, particularly around the Straits of Hormuz. In essence, the administration would have to be prepared to wage a secret, undeclared war targeting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

This is an altogether unattractive proposition, for a variety of reasons. Yet failure to get the grand diplomatic victory needed to prove the wisdom of engagement leaves the administration with few other options, other than conceding defeat (or hoping that internal dynamics in Iran lead to an overthrow of the current regime). Obama and his team are going to have some very hard choices when it comes to Iran in the coming months.

A WSJ op-ed by a former US ambassador to Syria & Israel, who also served as a political attache in at our Embassy in Moscow during the Carter years, recounts how three seismic events in 1979 helped shape the Islamist threat we now face and the wars we now fight: (1) the Iranian revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini's clerical fascist regime to power; (2) the Islamist seizure of Mecca that scared the Saudi regime to curry favor with Sunni radicalism by financing the global spread of Sunni extremism; (3) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that gave birth to Islamist jihadism.

Bottom Line.  Team Obama may indeed have no illusions as to the intentions of the Iranian regime.  But clearly they have illusions about how best to try to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold.  Regime change--offering meaningful support to the huge protest movement that now seeks a change in government rather than more honesty from the existing regime--is apparently out.  The kind of severe sanctions with sufficient bite to plausibly derail Iran's quest are apparently equally out.  The ball in 2010 thus remains where it has been since the 2007 NIE took military force of Team Bush's Iran option table: in Israel's court.

LFTC - Obama's Poland SOFA Sale

The Christian Science Monitor reports that as part of a Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Poland, America will deploy limited missile defense on Polish soil.  These missiles will not be, as the earlier system was, capable of intercepting ICBMs, which travel much faster than shorter range systems.  The new SOFA is better than nothing, but that Moscow was given even a partial veto last September remains a huge mistake.

LFTC - Nobel in Norway: "We-Talk" Words With "Me-Bomb" Manners

President Obama's Nobel Address.  There was much in the President's Nobel Address to admire.  He began modestly, by acknowledging that his award was for achievements hoped for, rather than completed:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations – that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize – Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela – my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women – some known, some obscure to all but those they help – to be far more deserving of this honor than I.

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by forty three other countries – including Norway – in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war, and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict – filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

Then he courageously affirmed the need for use of force--to a body whose awards have all too frequently gone to peacenik types:

In many ways, these efforts succeeded. Yes, terrible wars have been fought, and atrocities committed. But there has been no Third World War. The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Commerce has stitched much of the world together. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty, self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud.

A decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states; have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sewn, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, and children scarred.

I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

He then affirmed the need, at times, to use violence to stop barbarian threats, and saluted our soldiers as peacemakers:

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago – "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak –nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower.

Yet the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions – not just treaties and declarations – that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest – because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another – that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

He affirmed the right to use force unilaterally, but only if confined by rules:

To begin with, I believe that all nations – strong and weak alike – must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I – like any head of state – reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards strengthens those who do, and isolates – and weakens – those who don't.

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense. Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait – a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.

Furthermore, America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don't, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention – no matter how justified.

(Here were two points I emphatically reject:  First, the world did not rally behind America after the 9/11 attacks--the Arab world was silent, except for the Palestinians, who danced in the streets.  Only in Tehran, where one million people rallied in America's support, and, of course, in Israel, did Mideast denizens rally to our side.  Second, abiding by the rules, as LFTC has often noted, undermines Geneva's principle of reciprocity--destroying Geneva in order to save it.  And torture to prevent a WMD catastrophe is hardly wrong--I would call it a moral imperative.)

He called holy wars always unjust, because they are inevitably fought without any civilized restraint:

And most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith. Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it's incompatible with the very purpose of faith -- for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

He then affirmed three principles (I will use quote marks here):

1.  Develop Tough Alternatives to Violence.  "First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior – for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure – and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one.

2.  Lasting Peace is Based Upon Human Rights and Dignity.  "This brings me to a second point – the nature of the peace that we seek. For peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based upon the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting."

3.  Basic Human Rights Include Economic Rights.  "Third, a just peace includes not only civil and political rights – it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want."

The President's first principle is, I believe, quixotic, as international institutions show little serious sign of being up to enforcing meaningful rules against the planet's worst regimes.  His second principle is absolutely correct.  His third principle restates what socialist Europe introduced into the UN's panoply of rights.  Such rights encourage justification for authoritarian governance to achieve such goals.   They are better termed legitimate aspirations.

"Me-Bomb" Manners.  The Guardian reports that "The One" has infuriated his Norwegian hosts by his cavalier treatment of his Peace Prize visit.  Get a load of this:

Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.

The White House has cancelled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children's event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre.

He has also turned down a lunch invitation from the King of Norway.

According to a poll published by the daily tabloid VG, 44% of Norwegians believe it was rude of Obama to cancel his scheduled lunch with King Harald, with only 34% saying they believe it was acceptable.

Now, to be fair, The One (and spouse) also turned down dinner with the Sarkozys in Paris, while staying across the street from the Elysee Palace after the D-Day commemoration ceremonies.

As for those fine fellows on the Nobel Committee, what did they think they were getting?  Didn't they notice the "Hi, it's me!" Berlin rock-star speech of July 2008?  The fake Roman pillars at the August 2008 Denver Democratic Convention?  The snubbing of England's Prime Minister?  Skipping dinner with the Sarkozys?  True, The One did bow to the Japanese Emperor. But His Royal Highness is (well, almost) divine...as in, almost divine like the enlightened Nobel Ones who picked The One to snub The Cowboy.  The Cowboy, had he been chosen, would surely not have snubbed the Nobel Ones--but they, lefty to the core, would prefer being snubbed by The One.  In other words, the Nobel Ignobles got exactly what they deserved.

"Me-Bomb" Keyboard Coda.  Rock-star classical pianist Lang Lang played Franz Liszt's Liebestraum ("Lover's Dream") to finish the on-stage ceremony.  Here is an earlier clip (5:01) of Lang Lang playing the composition.  Both yesterday and in the earlier clip LL's histrionics are distracting, with extremes of "artistic ecstasy" crossing his visage.  Also he uses extremes of loud-soft ("dynamics" in pianist parlance).  For a far better version, with dignified presentation and superior interpretation in terms of pace and dynamics, listen to the legendary Artur Rubinstein's mid-1940s clip (4:50), taped at his home in Hollywood.

Bottom Line.  On balance, President Obama rose--more than rose--to the occasion.  While I would quarrel with many specific points, telling Scandinavian peaceniks--in Nobel Peacenik Paradise, no less--that lethal force--even, at times, its unilateral use--is necessary, is a worthy accomplishment.  Saluting America's military as peacemakers was terrific.  True, his delaying his Afghan War troop speech until last week forced him to say something in his Nobel address, but he did not have to be as forceful as he was.  OK, he wasn't Winston Churchill; but he wasn't Ward Churchill either.  For that he deserves credit.  Now, if we can only improve the President's manners when dealing with allies....

LFTC - Pakistan's Islamist Wild Card

This disturbing Globe & Mail op-ed by a Pakistani warns that pro-Isalmist elements in Pakistan's military are seeking to destabilize the elected civilian government.  The writer blames the US Congress for conditioning future US aid to Pakistan on a stepped-up effort against the Taliban & al-Qaeda.  Thus the US is between the ultimate strategic rock & hard place inside Pakistan: either let the civilian government cease its offensive against the Islamsits, or Islamist elements inside Pakistan's military will stage a coup and thus gain access to nuclear weapons.

LFTC - Pressuring Pakistan

the New York Times reports that Team Obama is pressing Pakistan to attack two key groups hiding in the tribal frontier lands--Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network.  This reflects their conclusion--likely correct--that without more pressure on militants hiding inside Pakistan the Afghan War is not winnable.

LFTC - SEALs Court-Martial: Will Lawfare Trump Warfare?

Human Events editor Jed Babbin urges superiors in the Navy to overrule the commander who plans to proceed with court-martial of three Navy SEALs accused of smacking a terrorist leader they captured.  JB details how at every stage when a mere reprimand might have settled the controversy, lawyers intervened to press for vindication of the legal system, regardless of the national security impact.  That no country ever won a war because it had a superior legal system escapes Lawfare advocates and, more dangerously, some military commanders too.

LFTC - IRAN: Closing in on a Nuclear Pearl Harbor?

As we remember the heroes who gave their lives 68 years ago at Pearl Harbor, Iran's President says Iran will pursue enhanced uranium enrichment on its own.  Specifically, the NYT reports:

Uranium enriched to 20 percent can fuel a reactor and also marks the dividing line between what nuclear specialists call low-enriched uranium and high-enriched uranium.

At the 20 percent level, Iran could, in theory, make an extremely crude and heavy nuclear weapon. The bigger threat would be that its enrichment could quickly accelerate from there to the much higher grade of fuel — enriched to 90 percent — typically used in modern nuclear warheads.

Iran has said the 20 percent uranium is needed for a reactor in Tehran that produces medical isotopes. The country denies that it has any intention of developing nuclear arms, and Mr. Ahmadinejad has not threatened to turn its current stockpile of enriched uranium into bomb fuel.

But his new declaration came just days after Iran angrily rejected demands that it shut down a once secret enrichment plant, and instead vowed to build 10 more. Mr. Ahmadinejad also announced that his cabinet would study what Iran needed to enrich its existing stockpile of uranium.

Two nuclear experts explained enrichment levels in practical terms:

A weapon made with 20 percent enriched fuel would be unwieldy compared with one made from 80 percent or 90 percent enriched fuel — what experts often call weapons grade.

“It’s hundreds of kilograms that would be needed, versus a few tens of kilograms at 90 percent,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation. “At 20 percent, a weapon would be doable but impractical” because of its gargantuan size. He called it “a monster.”

Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington that tracks atomic arsenals, said Iran would need more uranium that it currently possesses to make a bomb whose fuel was enriched to only 20 percent.

“That’s not the risk,” he said. “The risk is that it would be relatively easy for Iran to further enrich that material to something that is usable in a nuclear weapon.”

Iran rejected the deal to ship its uranium to Russia, asserting that it feared confiscation of their supply.

Ahmadinutjob also says that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is acting illegally in pressing Iran for its nuclear program gamesmanship.  He says Iran is legally entitled to enrich to 20 percent.  Friday Iran informed the IAEA that it will withhold disclosure on its ten new planned plants until six months before they begin operation, a position in violation of its prior commitments to the IAEA.

Russia may be cooling its heels slightly due to Iran's rejection of the deal for Russia to enrich Iranian uranium, writes Alan Philips.  Philips sees PM Vladimir Putin's position slipping due to economic woes, and President Dmitri Medvedev's position rising, with the latter less of a risk-taker:

There are objective reasons for the Russians to be angry with Iran, and to ditch their previous reticence about sanctions. These factors coincide with a subtle change in the balance of power inside Russia between Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev. Mr Putin hand-picked his successor, having eliminated all other rivals, and it was generally assumed that Mr Medvedev would be keeping the seat warm for him to return to the presidency in 2012.

But Putinism is losing its appeal. During his eight years in power as president, Mr Putin restored order and prosperity to Russia after the chaos of the 1990s. Real incomes doubled. But the financial crisis has cut living standards, slashed economic output and seen the state’s wealth pumped into bailouts of pro-Kremlin oligarchs and doomed industrial behemoths.

The contract between Mr Putin and the people is fraying. In Moscow people increasingly do not bother to vote in elections. All this has given Mr Medvedev some space to manoeuvre. No one is expecting a revolution, but over the course of four or five years it is easy to see that Mr Putin will become a spent force. Mr Medvedev is a cautious man. Despite his elevated office, he is often dismissed not as a decision-maker but as “a well-known Russian blogger”. It is far from certain that he is in a position to benefit from the troubles of his political godfather.

Ultimately, I see the rebalancing of forces in Russia as subtle rather than game-changing, and likely to be played out over a long period.

The Wall Street Journal editors see global reach to Iran's crackdown.  Four million Iranians live abroad and are vulnerable, especially if the regime can threaten family members still inside Iran.

But an Iranian crackdown has its limits due to growing resistance.  Specifically, opposition leaders are not being purged, and the show trials planned are aimed at low-level people:

Moussavi’s acolytes go beyond the sons of Islamic revolutionaries. He was prime minister when Iran created Hezbollah in Lebanon and then traded Western hostages for arms in the Iran-Contra affair, and his connections reach into those parts of the Iranian state that are most lethal to the U.S. and its allies. Much is made of the Iran-Iraq war veterans and IRGC officers who have prospered under Ahmadinejad. Just as important is that many of those now in the regime’s higher echelons got their start under Moussavi. Plucking his friends and associates out of the works could cripple key parts of the state, especially at the level of those managing and implementing complex projects on the nuclear and missile front.

The signs of leadership vacillation are public. With great fanfare, the regime has launched five show trials of hundreds of people, sentenced five men to die, and given others jail terms. The regime is considering legal action against Mehdi Karrubi, a twice-defeated presidential candidate, for revealing the rape of prisoners after June 12. Many of the show-trial defendants are well-known writers, academics, and former officials with reformist ideas and are associated with the ineffectual Khatami. These intellectuals have not been involved in organizing protests, nor do they have the foreign connections described in paranoid detail by the prosecution. In their coerced statements, they have fingered Moussavi, Khatami, Karrubi, and others as the culprits behind the post–June 12 unrest. Yet instead of heralding a grand show trial for Moussavi, Khamenei has backed away. In a remarkable intervention on August 27, he said, “I do not accuse the leaders of the recent incidents to be subordinate to the foreigners, like the United States and Britain, since this issue has not been proven for me.”

So the regime is slowly feeling its way forward, using standard repressive techniques that contain the conflagration without quite dousing the flames. Some of the best-known prisoners, such as former vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, have been convicted of the serious crime of seeking to overthrow the state—and then released on bail. The challenge facing Khamenei is both simple and intractable: with no purge, instability will continue, but with a purge, the regime can undermine itself in a way that no real or imagined CIA plot ever could.

A newly resurgent Syria is no help to efforts to reign in Iran.  Success in Syria after the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (2005) would have helped undermine Iran.  But that is not in the cards now.  And Iran continues to supply Hezbollah, in league with North Korea and in defiance of UN sanctions.  So Team Obama continues to prop up the North, writes Gordon Chang in Forbes, instead of withdrawing support and forcing China to carry the full burden of underwriting the North's rogue-sate antics.

Oh, Iran over the weekend said it will go for twenty--yes, 20!--not a mere ten (so yesterday!) new uranium enrichment plants.  Let the bidding begin...do I hear 25?...25, going once...the lady in the corner says 30!!...yes, that's 30!!, do I hear 35....40...do I see a mushroom cloud....

A Game at Harvard.  David Ignatius reports on having played in an Iran war game last week at Harvard.  Team Iran, by his lights, beat Team America:

How will the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program evolve during the next year? If a simulation game played at Harvard last week is any guide, the situation won't look pretty: Iran will be closer to having the bomb, and America will fail to obtain tough U.N. sanctions; diplomatic relations with Russia, China and Europe will be strained; and Israel will be threatening unilateral military action.

My scorecard had Team Iran as the winner and Team America as the loser. The U.S. team -- unable to stop the Iranian nuclear program and unwilling to go to war -- concluded the game by embracing a strategy of containment and deterrence. The Iranian team wound up with Russia and China as its diplomatic protectors. And the Israeli team ended in a sharp break with Washington.

Foggy Bottom's Fog.  Apropos of war games at Harvard, consider the different positions taken by former top State Dept. diplomat Nicholas Burns, who role-played President Obama, and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, who played Israeli PM Netanyahu:

The two key players agreed later that the simulation highlighted real tensions that the two countries need to understand better. "The most difficult problem we have is how to restrain Israel," said Burns. "My own view is that we need to play for a long-term solution, avoid a third war in the Greater Middle East and wear down the Iranians over time."

Gold said the game clarified for him a worrying difference of opinion between U.S. and Israeli leaders: "The U.S. is moving away from preventing a nuclear Iran to containing a nuclear Iran -- with deterrence based on the Cold War experience. That became clear in the simulation. Israel, in contrast, still believes a nuclear Iran must be prevented."

The game showed that diplomacy will become much harder next year. As Burns explains: "The U.S. probably will get no help from Russia and China, Iran will be divided and immobile, Europe will be weak, and the U.S. may have to restrain Israel."

WRONG--WRONG SQUARED!!!!  Memo to the Hon. N. Burns, from LFTC: Israel is our close ally; Iran is our deadly enemy.  Allies--real allies (i.e., those who fight alongside us)--are assets; enemies are liabilities, on our foreign policy balance sheet.  Twisting the arm of allies and placating enemies is a topsy-turvy world-view.  The main threat to the Mideast comes from a militant Islamic state ISO nuclear weapons, not the one nation that might stop them.

Bottom Line.  We fecklessly negotiate with Iranian diplomats, as our forbears negotiated with Japan's diplomats--right up to when the attack on Pearl Harbor began.

LFTC - Pakistan: Drone Drama

This NY Times front-pager last week frames well the complex drama surrounding Predator drone strikes in Pakistan.  Consider this odd trifecta of Pakistani attitudes: (a) the public living outside the tribal areas hates them; (b) the people living in the tribal areas praise them; (c) tribal leaders dislike them.  This last one suggests that tribal leaders have interests divergent from those of their flocks.  The article is well worth a full read, and portrays the complex tapestry of attitudes.  Meanwhile, the NYT also reported that Islamist militants bombed a mosque in Rawalpindi frequented by the Pakistani military.

LFTC - Afghan Aftermath: An Expert's Take, A Surprise Salute

National security maven and ex-Bush-43 official Eliot Cohen finds 44's speech wanting.  He focuses on three points:

When it comes to President Barack Obama's long-awaited decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, there are three main points to consider: the decision itself, the manner in which he made it, and the way in which he sold it.

Read what is the best compact assessment I have seen of the President's speech and problems he faces going forward.

And note also that 44 got kudos from a source he may not have counted upon: Sarah Palin, whose Afghanistan Facebook entry praises the President.

LFTC - Pakistan's Nukes: Change of Control; Chavismo Goes Nuclear

Last weekend Pakistan announced that command & control over its nuclear arsenal (est. 60-100 weapons) was transferred from its Prime Minster to its President.  Prime Minster Zardari faces investigations, plus pressure to cede power accumulated by his predecessor, General Musharraf.  A Wall Street Journal editorial adds important detail:

Pakistan set up the NCA in 2000, two years after it conducted nuclear tests. Gen. Musharraf introduced the reconciliation ordinance in 2007.

But the transfer of authority to the prime minister won't make much practical difference because Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program is effectively controlled by Pakistan's powerful military.

People familiar with the matter said the military was uneasy with Mr. Zardari's control of the country's nuclear weapons because it views him as too close to the U.S.They said Mr. Zardari was too dependent on Washington and sometimes wasn't in agreement with the strategic views of the military.

"There has not been a single meeting of NCA since Mr. Zardari became president, which possibly shows the military leadership was uncomfortable with him handling the country's nuclear program," said Mr. Rizvi, the defense analyst.

Last year, Mr. Zardari said Pakistan wouldn't make the first use of nuclear weapons if it were at war with India, a position that wasn't in agreement with Pakistan's nuclear doctrine.

Rickety governance in nuclear-armed Pakistan, under siege by Islamists, is yet another reason that American withdrawal from Afghanistan without some form of successful outcome carries huge risks.  Pakistanis reacted warily to 44's Afghan address, expressing deep concern about American motives.

Hugo Chavez's Criminal Nuclear Network: A Grave and Growing Threat (Oct. 2009), by Roger Noriega of the American Enterprise Institute, examines Venezuelan thug-terrorist Hugo Chavez's growing involvement in matters nuclear--specifically, supplying Iran with uranium and entering into a nuclear deal with Russia for "peaceful nuclear" activities.  Forbes reports that Russia is selling advanced arms & building arms plants.  Most notable is the advanced S-300 air & missile defense system that Iran wishes to purchase.  Yet more reasons to seek regime change in Caracas.

LFTC - Nation-Bulding Update: Iraq & Kosovo Upbeat

Reuters reports that violence in Iraq dropped in November to its lowest since the 2003 coalition invasion, with 88 deaths, the first under-100 toll in a war that has claimed over 100,000 Iraqi lives in 6+ years.  Terrorist groups are reserving their violence for spectacular attacks.

The Washington Post reports that Kosovo is more stable than forecast when its declared independence February 17, 2008, with Albanian violence against Serbs far lower than expected.  Elections are becoming routine despite a poor economy.  NATO's 14,000 troop peacekeeping force likely will be drawn down about 1/3 next year.

LFTC - Obama's Muslim Miss; Islam's Swiss Miss

Obama's Muslim Miss.  Mideast maven Fouad Ajami writes that The One's aura is gone in the Muslim communities.  He cites poll numbers that bring the Obama Legend down to Earth:

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America's decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

Ajami explains why 44's apology offensive abroad has backfired in Muslim lands:

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

Islam's Swiss Miss.  Meanwhile, the AP reports on that voters in Switzerland amended their country's Constitution to prohibit building more minarets (towers from which Muslim prayer calls are issued).  AP offers the key numbers and detail behind voter angst:

The referendum by the nationalist Swiss People's Party labeled minarets as symbols of rising Muslim political power that could one day transform Switzerland into an Islamic nation. The initiative was approved 57.5 to 42.5 percent by some 2.67 million voters. Only four of the 26 cantons or states opposed the initiative, granting the double approval that makes it part of the Swiss constitution.

Muslims comprise about 6 percent of Switzerland's 7.5 million people. Many are refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and about one in 10 actively practices their religion, the government says.

The country's four standing minarets, which won't be affected by the ban, do not traditionally broadcast the call to prayer outside their own buildings.

The sponsors of the initiative provoked complaints of bias from local officials and human-rights group with campaign posters that showed minarets rising like missiles from the Swiss flag next to a fully veiled woman. Backers said the growing Muslim population was straining the country "because Muslims don't just practice religion."

"The minaret is a sign of political power and demand, comparable with whole-body covering by the burqa, tolerance of forced marriage and genital mutilation of girls," the sponsors said. They noted that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has compared mosques to Islam's military barracks and called "the minarets our bayonets."

Mideast maven David Pryce-Jones offers background, plus a vital--but rare--demand the Swiss made upon the Muslim community:

The ban follows quite a bit of contention which started when the king of Saudi Arabia bought a house on the shore of Lake Geneva. Launching a building program without first obtaining the requisite permits, he was obliged to stop and pull down extensions. Geneva already had a mosque, and when the Saudis wanted to build another one, the city fathers replied that permission would be granted only when the Saudis reciprocated by allowing the building of a church in Saudi Arabia. Also following the brief arrest of his charmless son, Colonel Gaddhafi, the Libyan dictator,  uttered such threats that the authorities quickly and abjectly apologized.

But the Wall Street Journal editors see ostrich behavior in the Swiss vote:

But what message, exactly? The vote betrays an undercurrent of fear among the Swiss—a fear that is not without cause. There is no denying the connection between radical imams and terrorist acts. Nor should anyone look away from the fact that too many European Muslims flatly reject the norms of their host countries, sometimes in ways that are criminal: honor killings, child brides and the like.

Yet banning minarets does nothing to address that fear. It merely makes it less likely that the average Swiss will be confronted by a visible symbol of Islam upon his skyline. Thus, even as a symbolic gesture, it seems to encourage a head-in-the-sand approach toward the 5% of Swiss who are Muslim. In much of Europe, this is the norm anyway, the result of political correctness and cowardice.

Rather than being a blow against that attitude, Sunday's vote seems only to reinforce it. Banning minarets won't do anything to assimilate Switzerland's or Europe's Muslims, or to ensure that economic opportunity is available to everyone of whatever creed, or to deal with Western Europe's demographic problem of too few newborns.

Bottom Line. The One's greatest liability is not his leftism, though that is bad enough.  It is his monumental self-infatuation.  He truly sees himself as a world transformational figure.  I am reminded of the famous quip pianist Oscar Levant made to his close friend, pianist/composer George Gershwin: "George, if you had it do to all over again, would you fall in love with yourself?"  Gershwin probably would have, but then again, Gershwin had more reason to be impressed with himself than does 44.  Gershwin's achievements went beyond self-advancement, producing lasting artistic treasures for the world.  44 is not on track to match that.  And hence less self-regard is in order--coupled with, one hopes, more realism.  One form of such realism is to see what animated the Swiss voter revolt against the country's elites, as to politically correct views of Islam.

LFTC - IRAN: Taking Britain Hostage Again

The Washington Post reports that Iran seized five British sailboat racers who allegedly strayed into Iranian waters.  Such a provocative action taken at a time when nuclear negotiations are coming apart signals anew that Iran is confident nothing will stop it from crossing the nuclear threshold formally.  Two years ago Iran took British sailors hostages for a fortnight, and Tony Blair's government caved.  Gordon Brown figures to cave, too.  The mullahs are toying with the West, with increasing impunity.  All of which brings once again to mind the late Senator Patrick Moynihan's warning that "We court great danger when we invite the contempt of totalitarians."

We should instead give support to the likes of the Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, Iran's leading opposition cleric, who denounced the role of the Basij militia in recent violence by the regime against peaceful demonstrators; the Basij are the most extreme element of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.  Ayatollah Montazeri said on Monday: “Why do you beat people?  Because they do not accept what you say?  Basij was founded to act within the path of God, not Satan.  Isn’t it unfortunate to go to hell for the benefits of others?”

LFTC - Afghan War: Brits Brace "Bam; Germans Brace Germans; ICC & ICRC Brace US

Britain.  When Britain's defense secretary braces our President, you know we have a problem.  With 70 percent of British voters (estimates from NY Times reporter John Burns, given to CNN "American Morning") our transformative President is transforming opinion in the country that has been our closest ally for much of the period since FDR & Winston Churchill cemented the "special relationship" in 1941.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defence chiefs echoing the concerns.

But Mr Ainsworth is the first Government minister to express in public what amounts to personal criticism of the US president’s leadership over the conflict which has so far cost 235 British lives.
Polls show most voters now want an early withdrawal, following the death of 98 British service personnel this year alone.

Britain's 235 dead, for a country of 61M population, 1/5 of America's total, equates to an American toll of 1,175 on a per capita equivalent basis; America's actual Afghan war KIA is 928, 4 times the UK's total.  This explains why British voters are unhappy:

Mr Ainsworth, speaking to MPs at the defence committe in the House of Commons, welcomed that troop 'surge' decision, but lamented the time taken to reach it.

He said that the rising British death toll, the corruption of the Afghan government and the delay in Washington all hamper efforts to retain public backing for the deployment.

“We have suffered a lot of losses," he said. "We have had a period of hiatus while McChrystal's plan and his requested uplift has been looked at in the detail to which it has been looked at over a period of some months, and we have had the Afghan elections, which have been far from perfect let us say.

“All of those things have mitigated against our ability to show progress... put that on the other side of the scales when we are suffering the kind of losses that we are."

Britain has 9,000 troops in Afghanistan and has announced it will send another 500, a decision some US officials saw as a move to put pressure on Mr Obama.

Mr Ainsworth said he is confident that once Mr Obama confirms his new strategy, allies will follow and British public opinion will shift back in favour of the mission.

Germany.  Germany's Afghan Commander has resigned over disclosures that he was not fully candid about collateral casualties caused by a September 4 NATO air strike.

International Criminal Court (ICC).  The chief prosecutor of the UN's ICC plans to investigate American and allied military conduct in the Afghan War, validating fears that ICC Lawfare will target NATO warfare--even American actions, despite America having declined to ratify the ICC.  (To date: Team Obama may reverse this position).

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  The New York Times spotlights a "black jail" run by Special Ops in Afghanistan. The facility holds detainees who are interrogated without access to lawyers or Red Cross, for a period now restricted to a fortnight.  The NYT story is clearly unsympathetic, but is worth a read anyway.  These types of facilities should be reserved for HVTs--High-Value Targets--only.

Bottom Line.  Public vacillation by President Obama has been undermining support among voters in the country which has supplied more troops than any other to fight alongside us.  German voters need no outside help to undermine their own troops in the field.  And the UN is undermining international security, as ever.

LFTC - Nuclear Proliferation: Mythology's Dangers

Recently SecState Hillary Clinton offered her thoughts on principles to guide nuclear nonproliferation policy.  She recognizes that the current nonproliferation regime is in peril:

Recent developments underscore the threat. The international community failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Iran continues to ignore resolutions from the U.N. Security Council demanding that it suspend its enrichment activities and live up to its international obligations. Too much of the world's nuclear material remains vulnerable to theft or diversion, even as illicit state and nonstate networks engage in sensitive nuclear trade. And as we saw with the failure to detect Iran's covert enrichment plant and Syria's reactor project, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) doesn't have the tools to carry out its verification mission effectively.

If we do not reverse this trend and strengthen the international nonproliferation regime, we will find ourselves in a world with a steadily growing number of nuclear-armed states, and an increasing likelihood of terrorists getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

She also noted that President 44's goal of ultimate total nuclear abolition (a goal shared by every President who has held office in the Atomic Age) is a long way off:

As the president has acknowledged, we might not achieve the dream of a world without nuclear weapons in our lifetime. But by making the reduction of nuclear threats one of our highest national priorities and by reaching out to a diverse group of international partners, we can help build and lead a unified international effort that will make us safer and stronger.

Where she falls down--as does the President--is with the idea that America and other nuclear-armed states must lead by example in reducing their existing stockpiles:

To improve our standing to build broad international support for pursuing these means of strengthening the nonproliferation regime, the United States and the other nuclear-armed powers should fulfill their own obligation to reduce their nuclear stockpiles.

The problem with this is simply put: (1) America's nuclear weapons stockpile peaked in 1967; (2) the former Soviet Union's nuclear weapons stockpile peaked around 1980; (3) the other four major powers--Russia, Great Britain, France & China, which are the only signatory parties entitled to keep nuclear weapons under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), subject only to a "good faith' effort to ultimately fully disarm--are now modernizing, and in some cases, increasing, their nuclear weapons inventory.

These issues are superbly analyzed in detail in "Nuclear Disarmament, Nonproliferation and the 'Credibility' Thesis" (September 2009, 19 pages), a superb white paper by Hudson Institute scholar Christopher Ford, who held a senior State Department arms control post in the prior administration.  Ford addresses in detail the thesis that America has failed to lead by example.  In fact, as American and Russian disarmament accelerated after the signing of the INF Treaty in December 1987, the first arms treaty in which the signatories agreed to eliminate an entire class of weapons (Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles and cruise missiles based in Europe)--proliferation efforts accelerated elsewhere.

Worse, while we argue the above domestically and with our allies, an Iran-Venezuelan axis of nuclear evil is emerging in the southern hemisphere.  A second Cuban Missile Crisis may yet be in our future.  Iran maven Ruy Takeyh sees Iran using the nuclear issue to shield its rulers from human rights pressure, and thus preserve the regime and its perceived legitimacy.  SO on the 30th anniversary of Iran's taking our embassy, President Obama avows not to "intervene in Iran's internal affairs"--code-speak for ignoring repression at all costs.  WSJ editors note that, plus the contempt Obama has earned from the democratic opposition:

But the opposition's dreams of American support, moral as much as anything, have been dashed. Mr. Obama was slow and reluctant to speak out on their behalf and eager to engage the Iranian regime in nuclear talks as soon as the summer of protest tapered off. Iran's democrats are now letting their disappointment show. The new chant passed around in Internet chat rooms and heard in the streets yesterday was, "Obama, Obama—either you're with them or with us."

Knowing the opposition was planning to march, Mr. Obama issued his own statement the night before that instead chose to reach out to the regime. America, he said, "seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interest and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran's internal affairs." He went on to list the Administration's various efforts to appease the regime. So far and on all counts, the mullahs have rebuffed these entreaties.

Bottom Line.  Embracing mythic history of the Atomic Age can lead us dangerously astray.  Instead of almost obsessively focusing on further superpower disarmament we must focus on emerging rogue proliferators, and not deceive ourselves into believing that by "setting an example" the world's most dangerous regimes will follow.  The contrary is far more likely.  For the world's worst proliferators there is but one viable solution: regime change.

LFTC - Barack's "Guardian Angell"

This TAS piece on British pacifist Norman Angell, 1933 Nobel Peace Laureate, sees 44 following Angell's lead. Alas, this is another way in which the lessons of 1989 are lost on our novice President.

LFTC - Berlin 1989 + 20

Begin by savoring a clip of President Ronald Reagan's 1987 Berlin address (3:59) (full text) in which he called for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down that wall!"  Then savor the 1963 clip of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner!" speech (4:41).  (For full text of JFK speech scroll down in this link.)  Both were cheered heartily by the Berliners.  As LFTC has earlier noted, JFK's translators blew it.  In German, "ein Berliner" is a dough-nut, and thus JFK said "I am a dough-nut!"  But Berliners, who say "Ich bin Berliner" to indicate residency there, cheerfully let it pass.  JFK immediately followed with "I appreciate my interpreter translating my German" and at the end repeated his formulation.  JFK did better later on in his speech, proclaiming "Lach sie nach Berlin kommen!"--proper German for the theme of his speech that day: calling to those searching for where the center of the struggle between freedom and tyranny lay by proclaiming "Let them come to Berlin!"

Rich Lowry of NRO explains why Barack Obama is skipping the 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  In a nutshell, 44 is just not, as they say, into it.  It's not a "liberal thing": Liberal columnist Pete Hamill recounts his Berlin Wall journeys, then and now.  Euro-historian Timothy Garton Ash looks back at 1989 and sees in what he calls Europe's greatest year ever the continent's greatest triumph (freeing Eastern Europe), that year's greatest surprise (China) and tragedy emerging from the chrysalis (Islamism's fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie, presaging 9/11/2001), all at the same time, in the world's most consequential year since 1945:

In 1989, Europeans proposed a new model of nonviolent, velvet revolution, challenging the violent example of France in 1789, which for two centuries had been what most people thought of as "revolution." Instead of Jacobins and the guillotine, they offered people power and negotiations at a round table.

With Mikhail S. Gorbachev's breathtaking renunciation of the use of force (a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history), a nuclear-armed empire -- which had seemed to many Europeans as enduring and impregnable as the Alps, not least because it possessed those weapons of total annihilation -- just softly and suddenly vanished.

But then, as if this were all somehow too good to be true, 1989 also brought us Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie -- firing the starting gun for another long struggle in Europe, even before the last one was really over.

Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley says the West has failed to learn the economic lesson of 1989, i.e., that Marxism had to eventually collapse but a true capitalist system will endure.  A WSJ op-ed explains how Italy's conviction of 23 CIA officers for "rendering" from Italy to Egypt a terrorist wanted in Italy will undermine US-European cooperation in the hunt for terrorists.  Thus another 1989 lesson is lost: fight against the common enemy, not among ourselves.

Claudia Rosett explains why Obama's lack of understanding of how & why the Wall was dismantled impairs his ability to cope with today's challenges:

The threats besetting the world today involve essentially the same old conflict: freedom vs. tyranny. Today's variations on the Berlin Wall can be discerned in places where women face the coerced wearing of the veil; in the prison camps and firewalls of China; in the gulag and murderous border patrols of North Korea; in the rising police state in Russia; the missionary thuggery of Venezuela's Chavista "revolution"; the global tentacles of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and al-Qaida; the security forces that murdered protesters this spring in the streets of Tehran.

Today's Wall looms in such ventures as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, both involving not only the potential use of monstrous weapons by murderous regimes, but nuclear extortionist leverage--which these regimes are already using to bring free nations to heel.

In the matter of facing down such threats, the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, has plenty to teach--especially to a free world with current leaders too much given to disparaging capitalism and downplaying freedom.

CR adds:

The West has by now traveled a long road--from Reagan, who demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," to Obama, who in Berlin last year recast this piece of history as one big group hug: "A wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

Unfortunately, it is not the world standing "as one" that brings down such walls. There has always been good and evil. The attempt to straddle such divides, as Washington is now doing with Tehran, is an invitation to be torn apart. The Berlin Wall fell because brave people--on both sides of it--took a clear stand against tyrants and for freedom. That's still how the world works, and America's own fortunes still depend on whether our leaders live up to the principles that brought down the Berlin Wall, or sideline them as yesterday's news.

Here is an NRO symposium (prints 5 pages) on the anniversary.  Historian David Pryce-Jones recalls the role accident played in the fall of the Wall.  This William Buckley NRO link offers WFB's elegant takes on the event, from his book on the subject.

Ex-Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalls the joy in Berlin then, and the inspiration Reagan's call had given to those captive behind the Wall:

Ronald Reagan, I recognized in that Berlin hotel room, had given something to people in the East, something difficult to describe but tangible all the same. In predicting that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history, in describing the Soviet Union as an evil empire--in insisting that the West remained fundamentally vibrant and good, the Soviet Union backward and corrupt--Reagan had spoken the unspeakable. He had done what no one could do. And he had thus created for people in the East a new space for thought and feeling, a new sense of the possible.

Reagan had never been alone in calling for freedom. Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and others had all denounced the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, demanding human rights. Yet if an American president could call on the leader of the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall--if that could happen, if it were true--then what else might prove possible?

Ken Duberstein, then the White House deputy chief of staff, was in the limousine with Reagan as the president drove to the Wall to deliver the address. Years later, Duberstein told me what took place as they arrived. Reagan told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial passage. Then the president smiled. "The boys at State are going to kill me," Reagan said. "But it's the right thing to do."

Alas, 44 seems to listen too much to "the boys (and girls) at State" to reprise with Iran what Reagan did over East Germany.  In a touch of pure irony, Reagan's 1987 Berlin call to Gorbachev came on Jun 12--the very date in 2009 that Iran's fraudulent election was held.  And 44 responded not like Reagan but like the striped-pants set at Foggy Bottom.

For her part, Angela Merkel expressed her thanks to America Tuesday last week, first at a White House photo op with 44, and then in her address to a joint session of the Congress (the first in over 50 years for a German leader).  Here is a neat Merkel quote from the address, for those pressed for time.

My own favorite recollection is another key moment, on October 25, 1989--just 15 days before the Wall was toppled.  Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov announced on American TV that Moscow's new policy for Warsaw Pact nations was the "Frank Sinatra 'My Way' Doctrine"--each country could go its own way.  This sent a powerful signal to all Berliners.  And the rest was, as they say, history--1989 became annus mirabilis for all those who cherish expansion of human freedom within a framework of ordered liberty.

Bottom Line.  At the end of his Berlin speech, JFK proclaimed: "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin."  Had President Obama understood either JFK or Reagan, in their Berlin speeches, he today would proclaim everyone a citizen of Tehran, and make Tehran the locus of today's struggle for freedom.

LFTC - Afghan, Pakistani and American Betrayals

Last week's killing of five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman they had been training shows how dirty a counter-insurgency campaign can get.  More such betrayals and an exit from Afghanistan becomes front-burner.  The enemy knows this.  A new book from a retired French magistrate alleges a Pakistani double-game betrayal of the CIA in the post-2001 wars.  But America is not only sinned against but also sinner: Team Obama's pullback from Iraqi internal affairs has left the UN mediating, which means fakery instead of competence; the result could prove political disaster, and unwind much of the benefit of America's hard-earned position in that country.

And it is Team Obama's deal with Moscow, over the head of Poland & Czech Republic, that has Eastern Europe fearing more betrayal by America.  Moscow intends to use its new-found diplomatic position with Team Obama as a basis for exercising vetoes over possible US moves in its former satellite Warsaw Pact territories.  Thus, Moscow has publicly objected to possible deployment of US troops in Poland (requested by Poland's foreign minister), and has warned that a new war may be brewing with Georgia, due to Georgia's refusal to recognize the independence of its two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia & Abkhazia.  That Russian meddling led to the breakaway, and that Russia's invasion was flatly illegal, premised upon its asserted, though non-existent, legal right to "protect" Russian minorities allegedly being abused in the provinces, does not disturb Moscow in the least.  They have an American fish on the hook, and intend to reel in as much as they can, lest they lose the big fish.

Bottom Line.  America can only combat betrayal by its allies if America itself does not betray allies.

LFTC - IRAN: 30th "America Held Hostage" Anniversary

Today marks exactly 30 years since the then newly-minted Islamic Republic of Iran, under the ghastly Ayatollah Khomeini, seized the American embassy and took 52 diplomats hostage, beginning a siege that would last 444 days, until the day before Ronald Reagan was sworn in as America's 40th President.  Major opposition rallies were announced earlier this week; the Los Angeles Times reports that there were violent clashes in Tehran, though demonstrations were smaller than right after the June 12 election.  Two Iranian opposition figures excoriate President Obama for his failure to support democratic opposition to the regime.  Iran is skirting sanctions and stepping up uranium mine production.

The Washington Post reports that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dismissed the idea of top-level talks with President Obama:

Iran's supreme leader, spurning what he described as several personal overtures from President Obama, warned Tuesday that negotiating with the United States would be "naive and perverted" and that Iranian politicians should not be "deceived" into starting such talks.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 70, said Obama has approached him several times through oral and written messages. It was the second time that Khamenei, who wields ultimate political and religious authority in Iran, has referred to the president's outreach.

The White House has not confirmed sending letters to the Iranian supreme leader but has acknowledged a willingness to talk to Tehran and said it has sought to communicate with Iranian leaders in a variety of ways.

In his harshest comments yet on the Obama administration, Khamenei said in a speech Tuesday that the United States has ill intentions toward Iran and is not to be trusted.

"The new U.S. president has said nice things," he said. "He has given us many spoken and written messages and said: 'Let's turn the page and create a new situation. Let's cooperate with each other in resolving world problems.' "

Thus, in reality, America is still held hostage.  The New York Times reports that internal political division within Iran is holding back possible resolution of nuclear talks.  The Times goes further with this gem:

Another factor working against acceptance of the deal involves the widely held sentiment that Iran cannot trust the West, or Russia, which would first receive the uranium from Iran, to abide by the terms of any deal.

Even by the NYT's standards (low) this is a winner: Iran, which concealed an illegal nuclear program for 18 years, and had repeatedly lied in the 7 years since its program was discovered, does not trust the West to keep a bargain.  In the event, the NYT article ignores that Iran's political leadership is not so divided as to stop uranium enrichment within the country.

The Christain Science Monitor reports that Iran had already by February this year produced enough highly-enriched uranium (HEU) to produce one nuclear bomb.  At an estimated 2.75 kilograms of daily production at its Natanz facility Iran can produce enough HEU for a bomb per year.  This calculation does not include HEU produced at other sites, disclosed and undisclosed.

Bret Stephens chronicles the repeated "no" answers Iran has given to stopping its nuclear program.  He writes:

Yet even as Tehran's rejections piled up, a view developed that all would be well if only the U.S. would drop the harsh rhetoric and meet with the Iranians face-to-face. So President Obama began making one overture after another to Iran, including a videotaped message praising its "great civilization." Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei replied that Mr. Obama had "insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day."

Now American negotiators are dealing directly with their Iranian counterparts, which is just fine with Ahmadinejad. "As long as this government is in power, it will not retreat one iota on the undeniable rights of the Iranian nation," he said last week. "A few years ago, they said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities. Now look where we are today."

Bottom Line.  Thirty years ago America was held hostage for 444 days, a searing national humiliation.  Now we are being held hostage to a nuclear Iran, plaintively pursuing chimerical hopes that diplomacy will somehow save the day.  Jimmy Carter at least tried once to rescue the hostages.  That mission ended in abysmal failure.  The consequences of failure this time will prove far greater.  Yet President 44 seems disinclined to even make one serious effort to stop Iran.  The wages of defeat will be costlier this time.

LFTC - IRAN: Is Obama Conceding Nuclear Status?

TIME reports why Iran's counter-proposal--close to a full rejection--creates a "quandary" for Team Obama:

The agreement brokered by the International Atomic Energy Association Nuclear Agency in Vienna last week sought to bridge Western concerns that Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium could potentially be reprocessed into weapons material and Iran's need for fuel for a medical research reactor in Tehran. It requires Iran to provide the uranium for the fuel plates it needs from its own stocks, envisaging the transfer of an amount equivalent to some 75% of its stockpile to Russia by the end of the year for further processing. But according to Western officials briefed on Iran's response, Tehran wants instead to ship its uranium in smaller batches, and over a longer period of time. (Just as the Western powers suspect Iran of enriching uranium for ultimate conversion into bomb material, so do the Iranians suspect that the Vienna deal may fit with the Western goal of ending Iran's enrichment capability.) But Western officials warn that anything that leaves intact Iran's current stockpile — hypothetically enough to be reprocessed into a single crude atomic bomb should Iran decide to do so — is a deal-breaker. Although Iran continues to enrich uranium, replenishing the stocks of low enriched uranium shipped out under the deal would take about another year, during which time Western powers hope to negotiate an end to uranium enrichment in Iran.

The aspect of the deal most welcomed by Tehran was the fact that it represented a kind of tacit acceptance of Iran's enrichment program — after all, the uranium that would be used to create the reactor fuel was enriched in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, and the deal was not even contingent on Iran heeding those resolutions. Whereas the Bush Administration had refused to negotiate with Iran unless it halted enrichment, the Obama Administration has been talking without preconditions, about a deal that wouldn't even halt continued enrichment. Iran had managed to shift the debate from whether or not Iran should be allowed to enrich uranium to measures to safeguard its enriched uranium stockpiles from being used in a weapons program. Ahmadinejad proclaimed that diplomatic achievement when he appeared to endorse the nuclear deal on Thursday. "A few years ago, they said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities," he said in a speech broadcast live on state television. "Now they want nuclear cooperation with the Iranian nation."

Count Israel as among those not amused.

The Associated Press reported that Team Obama is preparing a contingency strategy to deter nuclear use by a nuclear Iran, should negotiations & sanctions fail (they will).  The essential idea is to apply what nuclear strategists call "extended deterrence" to allies in Europe & the Mideast.  This means that the US extends its nuclear deterrence umbrella so that attacks on allies under it are treated by the US as attacks on the US itself.  Oddly, Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi chimed in, saying that a nuclear Iran would not necessarily be intolerable.  She apparently does not grasp that a nuclear Iran could use its arsenal as a shield while it steps up repression domestically to ensconce its rulers permanently.

Nuclear proliferation maven Henry Sokolski urges imposition of sanctions against Iran now, to punish proliferation violations.  He suggests financial sanctions, human rights pressure and asking Moscow to disclose the list of Russian scientists helping Iran's nuclear program, that it may be compared with a list made by Israel.  But Moscow now says no sanctions anytime soon will be levied; Moscow can use its UN Security Council veto to prevent their effective imposition.

Here is a mini-paper on Fueling Iran's Research Reactor (4 pages) and a second on Iran's Centrifuge Uranium Enrichment (11 pages) program.  Both come from Sokolski's Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, an invaluable source of information on nuclear proliferation issues.  The latter report notes that Iran is the subject of four UN Security Council Resolutions re its nuclear program: UN SecRes 1737 (15 p.),  UN SecRes 1747 (9 p.), UNSec Res 1803 (7 p.) & UN SecRes 1835 (1 p.).

Bottom Line.  Iran marches on, Moscow throws roadblocks in front of efforts to contain Iran's uranium enrichment program.  Team Obama & the Europeans have already conceded Iran's right to enrich, which UN Security Council resolutions had hitherto denied.  If Tehran stonewalls & talks break down, Israel will know what it has to do.  Americans & Europeans may settle for deterrence, but it appears unlikely that Israel will accept the same choice.

LFTC - Obama's Graceful Honduras Climbdown From Disgraceful Policy

The Wall Street Journal, hardly pals with Team Obama, credits the administration with pulling the Honduran iron out of the fire via a face-saving compromise that likely will prevent Chavista Manuel Zelaya from retaining power:

The big news in Honduras is that the good guys seem to have won a four-month political standoff over the exile of former President Manuel Zelaya. Current President Roberto Micheletti agreed yesterday to submit Mr. Zelaya's request for reinstatement as president to the Supreme Court and Congress, and in return the U.S. will withdraw its sanctions and recognize next month's presidential elections.

Mr. Zelaya, whose term would have expired in January, isn't likely to be reinstated, given that the court has twice ruled against his right to remain in office. The Honduran Congress, which voted in June to remove Mr. Zelaya, will then use that high court's opinion to decide if he should be restored to power.

The agreement impliedly recognizes that Zelaya was deposed legally and thus is not automatically entitled to reinstatement.  The November 29 elections will go forward.  If reinstated--unlikely in that the Supreme Court & Congress approved Zelaya's ouster in the first place--Zelaya would serve until late January.  But he is not then out of the woods:

Washington and the Organization of American States have now promised to send observers and recognize the elections; there will be no amnesty for Mr. Zelaya if he is charged with a crime; and the zelayistas will renounce their plans to call for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. If Mrs. Clinton wants to call this a victory, it is—for Honduras.

WSJ South America pundit Mary Anastasia O'Grady hopes the new policy holds, but reminds us how awful US policy was, and how hated by most locals our current Ambassador there now is:

The need to dictate to Hondurans how to run their country has been the problem from the start. The moment the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the arrest of Mr. Zelaya in June for organizing mob violence and attempting to overthrow the constitution Mr. Llorens anointed himself colonial viceroy in charge of imposing U.S. will. Plenty of Molotov-hurling leftists also took Mr. Zelaya's side. But Mr. Llorens staked out a position for the U.S., defending the legitimacy of the erratic former president. The U.S. ambassador used every weapon he could lay his hands on to try to force the country to restore Mr. Zelaya to power.

This violated Honduran sovereignty. But Mr. Llorens's boss back home, Barack Obama, seemed more interested in appeasing U.S. enemies than standing by friends, or even sticking to his pledge not to meddle in other countries' affairs. Mr. Chávez and Fidel Castro were supporting Mr. Zelaya, and Mr. Obama apparently wanted to be part of the gang.

Clearly no one in Washington expected it to be so hard to break the will of Hondurans. That effort became even more embarrassing when zelayistas mounted a campaign of terror, kidnapping and murdering Honduran authorities and their relatives. There were at least three such incidents in two weeks. The terrorists were also sabotaging the country's electricity grid. To avoid further taint, the U.S. sent a delegation to strike the compromise reached late Thursday.

If O'Grady's pessimism proves unwarranted--and the fact that the new agreement prevents Zelaya from seeking a constitutional amendment to abolish the one-term limit for Presidents is a positive sign--then Team Obama no longer follows in the foolish footsteps of President Bush, whose administration promoted and accepted the 2006 Palestinian election won by Hamas.  43 did not grasp that promotion of democracy, while often in America's interest, is not always so.  Hitler was elected in 1933.  Should we have promoted him then?

Election of totalitarian, terrorist or thug leaders is not in our interest.  America's interest lies in promoting liberal democracy, not illiberal varieties--especially if they intend to spread noxious democratic forms.  America can accept unfriendly democracies that do not destroy democracy that do not spread tyranny, terror, subversion and the like.  Think India from 1950 until the fall of the Berlin Wall.  For those four decades India, a democracy save for 21 months in 1975-1977, was aligned with the former Soviet Union.  India bought Russian military equipment and voted against America in the United Nations, and in 1974 joined the nuclear club.  We did--rightly--live with this.  India still was a relatively liberal democracy.

But aiding a Chavista coming to power in Central America would have been democracy for dummies only.  Praise be to Team Obama for finding an exit strategy in Honduras that protects American interests.  If Team Obama wishes to save political & diplomatic face while so doing, OK by me--the best is enemy of the good.

Bottom Line.  Team Obama should take the lesson that Team Bush never fully absorbed: America's interest in promoting democracy extends only to liberal democracies.  Democracies that fall into the three Ts--totalitarian, terrorist and thuggish--need not apply for our help.

LFTC - Israel Marginalizes Mitchell

The Washington Times reports that Israel has put peace talks with the Palestinians on a slow track, contrary to Team Obama's & special Mideast envoy George Mitchell's wishes.  Israel is prepared (as oft before) to play Congress off against the Obama White House.  And the Washington Post reports that the Jordan River Valley is a focal point of Isreali-Palestinian conflict.

Reality is setting in.  Team Obama's fantasy of a rapid Israel - Palestinian settlement is history.  Further confirmation of this comes in the latest Palestinian condemnation of US policy, this time directed as SecState Hillary, because she reiterated Team Obama's latest position on Israeli settlements--"restraint" rather than an absolute freeze.  Predictably, Palestinians went ballistic, showing once again the futility of top-down high-profile Mideast peacemaking.  Only PM Netanyahu's bottom-up vision, already being put into practice with some success by Tony Blair & US Gen. Keith Dayton--securing one town at a time by stabilizing local government and ousting thugs & terrorists--can work.

Bottom Line.  Team Obama is learning what Team Bush learned: Dealing with the Palestinians in high-visibility diplomacy is like Charlie Brown dealing with Lucy & the football.

LFTC - Afghanistan Pakistan Bananistan

Terrorist attacks and Taliban repositioning, using smarter, more sophisticated tactics, have figured prominently in the campaigns by Islamists to disrupt the November 7 Afghan election and to destabilize the Pakistani government, which is mounting a serious sustained offensive in South Waziristan against Taliban strongholds.

Afghanistan.  The Afghan election authorities have rejected a UN proposal for the November 7 election re-run.  Strategic analyst Andrew C. Bacevich calls for setting strategy first, before committing more troops in Afghanistan.  Historian Walter Russell Mead argues that dealing with bad guys--including drug lords--may be necessary to prevail in Afghanistan.  Washington Post pundit David Ignatius reports on his latest visit there and says we must try to make the McChrystal strategy work.

Pakistan.  SecState Hillary Clinton expressed disbelief speaking to Pakistani audiences, concerning lack of cooperation in a war effort that is is, she said, Pakistan's parallel interest (with the US) to win.  The Washington Post reports:

"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," she told a group of newspaper editors during a meeting in Lahore.

"Maybe they are not 'get-at-able'. I don't know," she said.

Clinton's pointed remark was the first public gripe on a trip aimed at turning around a U.S.-Pakistan relationship under serious strain, but bound in the struggle against religious extremism.

"I am more than willing to hear every complaint about the United States," Clinton said, ""but this is a two way street.

"If we are going to have a mature partnership where we work together" then "there are issues that not just the United States but others have with your government and with your military security establishment."

Bottom Line.  It remains in America's strategic interest to prevent Islamist triumph in both countries.  But at times, one is tempted to throw up one's hands, and fall back on the password used by the the robbers in "The Hot Rock" (a 1972 Robert Redford - George Segal caper flick): "Afghanistan Bananistan."  We are trying to create stable and less corrupt governance in a singularly unpromising area.  But for now try we must.

LFTC - IRAN: Defunding Regime Change

Two foreign policy mavens, David Feith & Bari Weiss, detail in a Wall Street Journal op-ed how the State Department is cutting off funds for Iran's democratic opposition.  The money paragraphs:

Some—including Mr. Obama—claim that the U.S. would taint and implicate Iranian democrats by supporting them openly. To this argument, says Iranian democracy activist Roya Boroumand, "Ask yourself why Iranians who protest in the street write things in English. They're not just practicing language skills."

Ignoring activists who exemplify American ideals raises moral questions about U.S. foreign policy, but there is also a key practical question: Will the Obama administration likely succeed in ending Iran's nuclear-weapons program? What, after all, could Iran's mullahs get at the negotiating table that they would value more than the regional power and religious affirmation represented by a revolutionary Islamic nuclear weapon?

Mr. Obama's approach also reduces the chances that, if Iran does get a nuclear weapon, the internal opposition will be healthy enough to check the regime, challenge its adventurism, and champion a better future for the Iranian people.

The Obama team has long called itself pragmatic, open to altering its policies as realities shift. But its approach to Iran has remained unchanged since Mr. Obama was a presidential candidate, despite the Green Revolution.

"Before June's election," says former student leader Akbar Atri, who fled Iran in 2005, "the Obama administration was determined to negotiate about the nuclear issue because it assumed there was no strong democratic opposition inside the country. That was a wrong assumption. The election showed the Iranians want a different approach. They want to live in peace and freedom."

Read the rest of the op-ed for full detail.

Bottom Line.  Foggy Bottom at its worst is selling out human rights for the illusory notion than a tyrannical regime, on the cusp of nuclear club membership and the vast increase in power it will thus gain, will somehow bargain away such benefit.  Fat chance.

LFTC - Joe Biden Plays Eastern Europe

Here are Vice-President Joe Biden's October 22 Warsaw remarks and his October 23 Bucharest remarks.  Both were issued in conjunction with Joint Statements with each of the country leaders.  Here is his October 23 address at Central University Library, Bucharest, to students.

After presenting the administration's position as to why the new missile defense proposal is better than the one Team Obama scrapped, Biden spoke bluntly about accusations that America appeased the Russians:

Some -- maybe even understandably -- jump to the conclusion that this new missile defense approach was meant to appease Russia at the expense of Central Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is absolutely wrong. Missile defense is not about Russia. Our approach is driven by security requirements of the United States and our NATO allies, period. Period.

What is true is that we are working to strengthen our relationship with Russia. We believe that a more constructive relationship with Russia will benefit all. But we’re not naïve. The truth is we share some common interests: cutting the arsenals of nuclear weapons; securing vulnerable nuclear materials; stabilizing Afghanistan; preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

And we also continue to have disagreements with Russia on matters of basic principle. In February, in Munich, Germany, in the very first major foreign policy speech of our administration, I enunciated our administration’s outline for foreign policy, and I made clear our core principles. The United States stands against the 19th century notion of “spheres of influence.” We will not tolerate it, nor will we be co-opted by it.

We stand for the right of sovereign democracies to make their own decisions, to choose their own alliances, without the right of any country to veto those decisions. We will never make a deal about anything with anyone above your heads or behind your backs. The maxim we live by is clear: nothing about you without you, nothing about you without you. And I would argue, look at our track record, look at our track record.

Biden then offered warm tribute to Eastern Europe's achievements since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989:

There’s an old Romanian proverb: “The cheapest article is advice. The most valuable is a good example.” You are the “good example.” Twenty years ago, the people of Central Europe took the world history that they inherited, and willed it in a new direction toward greater freedom, justice, and fairness. The odds were stacked against you. We know from history that destroying old oppressive regimes is a great deal easier than building new flourishing democracies. But you’ve delivered on the promise of your revolution. You are now in the position to help others do the same.

Speaking to our Congress 20 winters ago, Vaclav Havel pointed to a special sense of empathy and imagination the people of Central Europe share. Years of subjugation, he said, “have given us, however unintentionally, something positive: a special capacity to look somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience.” He went on to say: “A person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way.” He was right.

Now you have the freedom to act on those hopes, and you are. And I believe together we can turn that hope that we shared into a history we can be proud of. This is the moment. You students, if we are smart, brave, and lucky will be able to tell your grandchildren you were present at the creation of a new Europe, a new security, a new era of peace, because you were bold enough to seize that moment. Be like those in ‘89. Be bold. Exercise your leadership. You have a history, and you have a tradition. You can make a gigantic difference. And we’ll stand with you.

Because Biden is playing a "Cheney-lite" role in the administration, his trip deserved more attention than it got.  Prior to Biden's visit, Vaclav Havel gave an interview to Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty (3:04), in which he defended the missile defense move as normal for a new administration, and said he expected Biden to reassure Europe as to America's commitment.

Havel, perhaps for reasons of tact, simply ignored the promise--recently broken--that President Obama made in his April 5 Prague address not go to over the head of the Czechs and determine their destiny without their having a seat at the table:

To provide for our common security, we must strengthen our alliance. NATO was founded 60 years ago, after Communism took over Czechoslovakia. That was when the free world learned too late that it could not afford division. So we came together to forge the strongest alliance that the world has ever known. And we should -- stood shoulder to shoulder -- year after year, decade after decade –- until an Iron Curtain was lifted, and freedom spread like flowing water.

This marks the 10th year of NATO membership for the Czech Republic. And I know that many times in the 20th century, decisions were made without you at the table. Great powers let you down, or determined your destiny without your voice being heard. I am here to say that the United States will never turn its back on the people of this nation. (Applause.) We are bound by shared values, shared history -- (applause.) We are bound by shared values and shared history and the enduring promise of our alliance. NATO's Article V states it clearly: An attack on one is an attack on all. That is a promise for our time, and for all time.

Bottom Line.  Biden's Bucharest speech was wonderful.  And Havel stressed the longer relationship. While it is a plus that Biden reaffirmed America's commitment and intent to keep Moscow at bay, the precipitous recent decision by Team Obama to negotiate with Moscow on the original missile defense system--decided over the heads of the Poles & Czechs, notwithstanding President Obama's April 5 promise--may make Biden's proclamation a hard sell.

LFTC - Afghanistan: Politics Prevails There--and Here

Steve Coll, author of the superb Charlie Wilson's War, surveys the Afghan scene and says that politics will determine whether we can prevail there.  A corrupt, incompetent regime will find a way to lose.  Sadly, the Taliban are learning from experience and becoming more competent--shades of Hezbollah in Lebanon.  The Wall Street Journal editors see our "AfPak" allies stepping up to the plate while President Obama dithers.

LFTC - Afghanistan: An Expert's View

The following essay co-authored by Stratfor founder/CEO George Friedman is reprinted by permission from Stratfor:

The U.S. Challenge in Afghanistan

By George Friedman & Reva Bhalla

October 20, 2009

The decision over whether to send more U.S. troops into Afghanistan may wait until the contested Afghan election is resolved, U.S. officials said Oct. 18. The announcement comes as U.S. President Barack Obama is approaching a decision on the war in Afghanistan. During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Obama argued that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time, but Afghanistan was a necessary war. His reasoning went that the threat to the United States came from al Qaeda, Afghanistan had been al Qaeda’s sanctuary, and if the United States were to abandon Afghanistan, al Qaeda would re-establish itself and once again threaten the U.S. homeland. Withdrawal from Afghanistan would hence be dangerous, and prosecution of the war was therefore necessary.

After Obama took office, it became necessary to define a war-fighting strategy in Afghanistan. The most likely model was based on the one used in Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus, now head of U.S. Central Command, whose area of responsibility covers both Afghanistan and Iraq. Paradoxically, the tactical and strategic framework for fighting the so-called “right war” derived from U.S. military successes in executing the so-called “wrong war.” But grand strategy, or selecting the right wars to fight, and war strategy, or how to fight the right wars, are not necessarily linked.

Afghanistan, Iraq and the McChrystal Plan

Making sense of the arguments over Afghanistan requires an understanding of how the Iraq war is read by the strategists fighting it, since a great deal of proposed Afghan strategy involves transferring lessons learned from Iraq. Those strategists see the Iraq war as having had three phases. The first was the short conventional war that saw the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s military. The second was the period from 2003-2006 during which the United States faced a Sunni insurgency and resistance from the Shiite population, as well as a civil war between those two communities. During this phase, the United States sought to destroy the insurgency primarily by military means while simultaneously working to scrape a national unity government together and hold elections. The third phase, which began in late 2006, was primarily a political phase. It consisted of enticing Iraqi Sunni leaders to desert the foreign jihadists in Iraq, splitting the Shiite community among its various factions, and reaching political — and financial — accommodations among the various factions. Military operations focused on supporting political processes, such as pressuring recalcitrant factions and protecting those who aligned with the United States. The troop increase — aka the surge — was designed to facilitate this strategy. Even more, it was meant to convince Iraqi factions (not to mention Iran) that the United States was not going to pull out of Iraq, and that therefore a continuing American presence would back up guarantees made to Iraqis.

It is important to understand this last bit and its effect on Afghanistan. As in Iraq, the idea that the United States will not abandon local allies by withdrawing until Afghan security forces could guarantee the allies’ security lies at the heart of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. The premature withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, e.g., before local allies’ security could be guaranteed, would undermine U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. To a great extent, the process of U.S. security guarantees in Afghanistan depends on the credibility of those guarantees: Withdrawal from Iraq followed by retribution against U.S. allies in Iraq would undermine the core of the Afghan strategy.

U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy in Afghanistan ultimately is built around the principle that the United States and its NATO allies are capable of protecting Afghans prepared to cooperate with Western forces. This explains why the heart of McChrystal’s strategy involves putting U.S. troops as close to the Afghan people as possible. Doing so will entail closing many smaller bases in remote valleys — like the isolated outpost recently attacked in Nuristan province — and opening bases in more densely populated areas.

McChrystal’s strategy therefore has three basic phases. In phase one, his forces would fight their way into regions where a large portion of the population lives and where the Taliban currently operates, namely Kabul, Khost, Helmand and Kandahar provinces. The United States would assume a strategic defensive posture in these populated areas. Because these areas are essential to the Taliban, phase two would see a Taliban counterattack in a bid to drive McChrystal’s forces out, or at least to demonstrate that the U.S. forces cannot provide security for the local population. Paralleling the first two phases, phase three would see McChrystal using his military successes to forge alliances with indigenous leaders and their followers.

It should be noted that while McChrystal’s traditional counterinsurgency strategy would be employed in populated areas, U.S. forces would also rely on traditional counterterrorism tactics in more remote areas where the Taliban have a heavy presence and can be pursued through drone strikes. The hope is that down the road, the strategy would allow the United States to use its military successes to fracture the Taliban, thereby encouraging defections and facilitating political reconciliation with Taliban elements driven more by political power than ideology.

There is a fundamental difference between Iraq and Afghanistan, however. In Iraq, resistance forces rarely operated in sufficient concentrations to block access to the population. By contrast, the Taliban on several occasions have struck with concentrations of forces numbering in the hundreds, essentially at company-size strength. If Iraq was a level one conflict, with irregular forces generally refusing conventional engagement with coalition forces, Afghanistan is beginning to bridge the gap from a level one to a level two conflict, with the Taliban holding territory with forces both able to provide conventional resistance and to mount some offensives at the company level (and perhaps at the battalion level in the future). This means that occupying, securing and defending areas such that the inhabitants see the coalition forces as defenders rather than as magnets for conflict is the key challenge.

Adding to the challenge, elements of McChrystal’s strategy are in tension. First, local inhabitants will experience multilevel conflict as coalition forces move into a given region. Second, McChrystal is hoping that the Taliban goes on the offensive in response. And this means that the first and second steps will collide with the third, which is demonstrating to locals that the presence of coalition forces makes them more secure as conflict increases (which McChrystal acknowledges will happen). To convince locals that Western forces enhance their security, the coalition will thus have to be stunningly successful both at defeating Taliban defenders when they first move in and in repulsing subsequent Taliban attacks.

In its conflict with the Taliban, the coalition’s main advantage is firepower, both in terms of artillery and airpower. The Taliban must concentrate its forces to attack the coalition; to counter such attacks, the weapons of choice are airstrikes and artillery. The problem with both of these weapons is first, a certain degree of inaccuracy is built into their use, and second, the attackers will be moving through population centers (the area held by both sides is important precisely because it has population). This means that air- and ground-fire missions, both important in a defensive strategy, run counter to the doctrine of protecting population.

McChrystal is fully aware of this dilemma, and he has therefore changed the rules of engagement to sharply curtail airstrikes in areas of concentrated population, even in areas where U.S. troops are in danger of being overrun. As McChrystal said in a recent interview, these rules of engagement will hold “Even if it means we are going to step away from a firefight and fight them another day.”

This strategy poses two main challenges. First, it shifts the burden of the fighting onto U.S. infantry forces. Second, by declining combat in populated areas, the strategy runs the risk of making the populated areas where political arrangements might already be in place more vulnerable. In avoiding air and missile strikes, McChrystal avoids alienating the population through civilian casualties. But by declining combat, McChrystal risks alienating populations subject to Taliban offensives. Simply put, while airstrikes can devastate a civilian population, avoiding airstrikes could also devastate Western efforts, as local populations could see declining combat as a betrayal. McChrystal is thus stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place on this one.

One of his efforts at a solution has been to ask for more troops. The point of these troops is not to occupy Afghanistan and impose a new reality through military force, which is impossible (especially given the limited number of troops the United States is willing to dedicate to the problem). Instead, it is to provide infantry forces not only to hold larger areas, but to serve as reinforcements during Taliban attacks so the use of airpower can be avoided. Putting the onus of this counterinsurgency on the infantry, and having the infantry operate without airpower, is radical departure in U.S. fighting doctrine since World War II.

Seismic Shift in War Doctrine

Geopolitically, the United States fights at the end of a long supply line. Moreover, U.S. forces operate at a demographic disadvantage. Once in Eurasia, U.S. forces are always outnumbered. Infantry-on-infantry warfare is attritional, and the United States runs out of troops before the other side does. Infantry warfare does not provide the United States any advantage, and in fact, it places the United States at a disadvantage. Opponents of the United States thus have larger numbers of fighters; greater familiarity and acclimation to the terrain; and typically, better intelligence from countrymen behind U.S. lines. The U.S. counter always has been force multipliers — normally artillery and airpower — capable of destroying enemy concentrations before they close with U.S. troops. McChrystal’s strategy, if applied rigorously, shifts doctrine toward infantry-on-infantry combat. His plan assumes that superior U.S. training will be the force multiplier in Afghanistan (as it may). But that assumes that the Taliban, a light infantry force with numerous battle-hardened formations optimized for fighting in Afghanistan, is an inferior infantry force. And it assumes that U.S. infantry fighting larger concentrations of Taliban forces will consistently defeat them.

Obviously, if McChrystal drives the Taliban out of secured areas and into uninhabited areas, the United States will have a tremendous opportunity to engage in strategic bombardment both against Taliban militants themselves and against supply lines no longer plugged into populated areas. But this assumes that the Taliban would not reduce its operations from company-level and higher assaults down to guerrilla-level operations in response to being driven out of population centers. If the Taliban did make such a reduction, it would become indistinguishable from the population. This would allow it to engage in attritional warfare against coalition forces and against the protected population to demonstrate that coalition forces can’t protect them. The Taliban already has demonstrated the ability to thrive in both populated and rural areas of Afghanistan, where the terrain favors the insurgent far more than the counterinsurgent.

The strategy of training Afghan soldiers and police to take up the battle and persuading insurgents to change sides faces several realities. The Taliban has an excellent intelligence service built up during the period of its rule and afterward, allowing it to populate the new security forces with its agents and loyalists. And while persuading insurgents to change sides certainly can happen, whether it can happen to the extent of leaving the Taliban materially weakened remains in doubt. In Iraq, this happened not because of individual changes, but because regional ethnic leadership — with their own excellent intelligence capabilities — changed sides and drove out opposing factions. Individual defections were frequently liquidated.

But Taliban leaders have not shown any inclination for changing sides. They do not believe the United States is in Afghanistan to stay. Getting individual Taliban militants to change sides creates an intelligence-security battle. But McChrystal is betting that his forces will form bonds with the local population so deep that the locals will provide intelligence against Taliban forces operating in the region. The coalition must thus demonstrate that the risks of defection are dwarfed by the advantages. To do this, the coalition security and counterintelligence must consistently and effectively block the Taliban’s ability to identify, locate and liquidate defenders. If McChrystal cannot do that, large-scale defection will be impossible, because well before such defection becomes large scale, the first defectors will be dead, as will anyone seen by the Taliban as a collaborator.

Ultimately, the entire strategy depends on how you read Iraq. In Iraq, a political decision was made by an intact Sunni leadership able to enforce its will among its followers. Squeezed between the foreign jihadists who wanted to usurp their position and the Shia, provided with political and financial incentives, and possessing their own forces able to provide a degree of security themselves, the Sunni leadership came to the see the Americans as the lesser evil. They controlled a critical mass, and they shifted. McChrystal has made it clear that the defections he expects are not a Taliban faction whose leadership decides to shift, but Taliban soldiers as individuals or small groups. That isn’t ultimately what turned the Iraq war but something very different — and quite elusive in counterinsurgency. He is looking for retail defections to turn into a strategic event.

Moreover, it seems much too early to speak of the successful strategy in Iraq. First, there is increasing intracommunal violence in anticipation of coming elections early next year. Second, some 120,000 U.S. forces remain in Iraq to guarantee the political and security agreements of 2007-2008, and it is far from clear what would happen if those troops left. Finally, where in Afghanistan there is the Pakistan question, in Iraq there remains the Iran question. Instability thus becomes a cross-border issue beyond the scope of existing forces.

The Pakistan situation is particularly problematic. If the strategic objective of the war in Afghanistan is to cut the legs out from under al Qaeda and deny these foreign jihadists sanctuary, then what of the sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal belt where high-value al Qaeda targets are believed to be located? Pakistan is fighting its share of jihadists according to its own rules; the United States cannot realistically expect Islamabad to fulfill its end of the bargain in containing al Qaeda. The primary U.S. targets in this war are on the wrong side of the border, and in areas where U.S. forces are not free to operate. The American interest in Afghanistan is to defeat al Qaeda and prevent the emergence of follow-on jihadist forces. The problem is that regardless of how secure Afghanistan is, jihadist forces can (to varying degrees) train and plan in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia — or even Cleveland for that matter. Securing Afghanistan is thus not necessarily a precondition for defeating al Qaeda.

Iraq is used as the argument in favor of the new strategy in Afghanistan. What happened in Iraq was that a situation that was completely out of hand became substantially less unstable because of a set of political accommodations initially rejected by the Americans and the Sunnis from 2003-2006. Once accepted, a disastrous situation became an unstable situation with many unknowns still in place.

If the goal of Afghanistan is to forge the kind of tenuous political accords that govern Iraq, the factional conflicts that tore Iraq apart are needed. Afghanistan certainly has factional conflicts, but the Taliban, the main adversary, does not seem to be torn by them. It is possible that under sufficient pressure such splits might occur, but the Taliban has been a cohesive force for a generation. When it has experienced divisions, it hasn’t split decisively.

On the other hand, it is not clear that Western forces in Afghanistan can sustain long-term infantry conflict in which the offensive is deliberately ceded to a capable enemy and where airpower’s use is severely circumscribed to avoid civilian casualties, overturning half a century of military doctrine of combined arms operations.

The Bigger Picture

The best argument for fighting in Afghanistan is powerful and similar to the one for fighting in Iraq: credibility. The abandonment of either country will create a powerful tool in the Islamic world for jihadists to argue that the United States is a weak power. Withdrawal from either place without a degree of political success could destabilize other regimes that cooperate with the United States. Given that, staying in either country has little to do with strategy and everything to do with the perception of simply being there.

The best argument against fighting in either country is equally persuasive. The jihadists are right: The United States has neither the interest nor forces for long-term engagements in these countries. American interests go far beyond the Islamic world, and there are many present (to say nothing of future) threats from outside the region that require forces. Overcommitment in any one area of interest at the expense of others could be even more disastrous than the consequences of withdrawal.

In our view, Obama’s decision depends not on choosing between McChrystal’s strategy and others, but on a careful consideration of how to manage the consequences of withdrawal. An excellent case can be made that now is not the time to leave Afghanistan, and we expect Obama to be influenced by that thinking far more than by the details of McChrystal’s strategy. As McChrystal himself points out, there are many unknowns and many risks in his own strategy; he is guaranteeing nothing.

Reducing American national strategy to the Islamic world, or worse, Afghanistan, is the greater threat. Nations find their balance, and the heavy pressures on Obama in this decision basically represent those impersonal forces battering him. The question he must ask himself is simple: In what way is the future of Afghanistan of importance to the United States? The answer that securing it will hobble al Qaeda is simply wrong. U.S. Afghan policy will not stop a global terrorist organization; terrorists will just go elsewhere. The answer that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is important in shaping the Islamic world’s sense of American power is better, but even that must be taken in context of other global interests.

Obama does not want this to be his war. He does not want to be remembered for Afghanistan the way George W. Bush is remembered for Iraq or Lyndon Johnson is for Vietnam. Right now, we suspect Obama plans to demonstrate commitment, and to disengage at a more politically opportune time. Johnson and Bush showed that disengagement after commitment is nice in theory. For our part, we do not think there is an effective strategy for winning in Afghanistan, but that McChrystal has proposed a good one for “hold until relieved.” We suspect that Obama will hold to show that he gave the strategy a chance, but that the decision to leave won’t be too far off.

LFTC - Pakistan on the Precipice

This Daily Telegraph article neatly encapsulates America's dilemma in Pakistan: a country whose leaders play a double-game, hedging here & there, hoping to survive and outlast the Americans and the Taliban.  America's leaving Pakistan in the lurch in 1989, after the end of the Russo-Afghan war, was a factor; but so has been rising Islamism inside Pakistan, especially in the military & intelligence services who historically have wielded decisive power inside the country.  A final reckoning may possibly be in the offing.  Retired Army office Robert Maginiss offers his Afghan-Pakistan prescription for Team Obama.  Ex-CNN reporter Peter Bergen, who interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1998, sees a Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance emerging.  Noteworthy are two points Bergen makes: (1) training terrorists over the Internet is not very effective, as it lack sufficient depth; (2) al-Qaeda wants to take over a failed state again, not remain a stateless network.  Stay tuned.

LFTC - Nuclear Arms: Sleepwalking Towards Armageddon

On September 30, 2009 I gave a talk in Seattle, entitled "Nuclear Arms: Sleepwalking Towards Armageddon".  My topic then is a first airing of the subject matter of my second book, which I aim to complete in time for publication next fall.  I begin with an historical overview of 64 years 1945-2009, the Nuclear Age.  I then use country studies, so to speak, to illustrate the problems of nuclear proliferation & arms control.  Russia presents problems of big power linkage, in which arms control is conjoined with a host of other problems Russia poses; Iran represents the problem of an aspiring regional hegemon, with perhaps still a messianic streak that makes deterrence exceptionally problematic; North Korea is the "crazy aunt in the attic"--a rogue proliferator; Pakistan presents problems of command & control of its growing nuclear arsenal; the United States faces the problem of negotiating agreements with disagreeables.

The talk runs about 20 minutes.  It is followed by a Q&A of about twice that length.

LFTC - Afghan War: Counterinsurgency Blues

The Washington Times reports that a "dead" al-Qaeda terrorist, thought to have been killed by a Sept. 7 Predator drone strike, has surfaced on the radio.  So much for VP Joe Biden's stand-off strikes war model.  The UK Times Online reports that Italian troops sandbagged their French successors in one Afghan region.  Seems the Italians made a deal with the Taliban, paying them off so as to prevent attacks on Italian positions; but they neglected to disclose this to the French successors, who found themselves ambushed when payments ceased.  The French went into a "safe" area lightly armed and were set upon by Taliban.  Casualties were growing when US special forces came to the rescue with air strikes.  Read the full article for a case study in Italian fecklessness.

In Commentary, Max Boot explains why counterinsurgency works better as a strategy than stand-off counterterrorism targeting.  He starts by defining the terms:

The terms counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have become common currency this decade in the wake of September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. To a layman’s ear, they can sound like synonyms, especially because of our habit of labeling all insurgents as terrorists. But to military professionals, they are two very different concepts. Counterterrorism refers to operations employing small numbers of Special Operations “door kickers” and high-tech weapons systems such as Predator drones and cruise missiles. Such operations are designed to capture or kill a small number of “high-value targets.” Counterinsurgency, known as COIN in military argot, is much more ambitious. According to official Army doctrine, COIN refers to “those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” The combined approach typically requires a substantial commitment of ground troops for an extended period of time.

Boot continues with General McChrystal's explanation:

The case against a counterterrorism approach in Afghanistan is laid out most clearly in the Counterinsurgency Guidance. McChrystal’s focus is on explaining why conventional military operations cannot defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, but the same arguments apply to counterterrorism generally, which is a smaller-scale version of the same conceit—that the U.S. military can defeat an insurgency simply by killing insurgents. McChrystal writes that the math doesn’t add up:

From a conventional standpoint, the killing of two insurgents in a group of ten leaves eight remaining: 10 - 2 = 8. From the insurgent standpoint, those two killed were likely related to many others who will want vengeance. If civilian casualties occurred, that number will be much higher. Therefore, the death of two creates more willing recruits: 10 minus 2 equals 20 (or more) rather than 8.

He goes on to note that the “attrition” approach has been employed in Afghanistan over the past eight years by a relatively small number of American forces and their NATO allies. Yet, he writes, “eight years of individually successful kinetic operations have resulted in more violence.” He continues: “This is not to say that we should avoid a fight, but to win we need to do much more than simply kill or capture militants.”
What else, then, must coalition forces do? McChrystal’s answer:

An effective “offensive” operation in counterinsurgency is one that takes from the insurgent what he cannot afford to lose—control of the population. We must think of offensive operations not simply as those that target militants, but ones that earn the trust and support of the people while denying influence and access to the insurgents.

Boot then notes that the payoff comes after taking higher casualties up front:

While counterintuitive to a conventional military mind, such thinking is hardly novel for anyone familiar with the history of counterinsurgency. McChrystal’s advice to embrace the population and be sparing in the use of firepower has been employed by successful counterinsurgents from the American Army in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century; to the British in Malaya in the 1950s and Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s; to, more recently, the Americans in Iraq. By contrast, counterinsurgency strategies that rely on firepower have usually failed, whether tried by the French in Algeria, by the U.S. in Vietnam, or by the Russians in Afghanistan.

The risk of the counterinsurgency approach—which helps to explain why it has not been adopted in Afghanistan until now or in Iraq until 2007—is that, in the short term, it will result in more casualties for coalition forces. Placing troops among the people and limiting their expenditure of firepower makes them more vulnerable at first than if they were sequestered on heavily fortified bases and ventured out only in heavily armored convoys. But in the long term, as the experience of Iraq shows, getting troops off their massive bases is the surest way to pacify the country and bring down casualties, both for civilians and security forces.

Boot adds several pages of analysis to the above, in an 8-pager well worth reading in full.

Bottom Line.  To have a chance to prevail in Afghanistan, we will need to accept more casualties now, and also build a stable Afghan government that does not alienate the locals.

LFTC - Pakistan Nuclear Weapons Security

A Congressional Research Service paper, Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Ssecurity Issues (July 30, 2009, 18 pages), examines the issue that scares more thinking Americans than any other in Southwest Asia.  Ex-CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht sees Pakistan & Iran as future WMD threats, being more educated than Arab Islamists:

No doubt bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri would probably prefer to have the central front again in the Arab world. But in Afghanistan and Pakistan they have wars that their side might win. Now, or in the not-too-distant future, it may be impossible operationally and philosophically to tell the difference between Arab Al Qaeda and Afghan and Pakistani radical groups, which have as a lodestar the Pashtun militants who make up the neo-Taliban on both sides of the border. The foot soldiers of this cause are not as worldly as their Arab forerunners; they do not have any noteworthy thinkers drawing large crowds.

But they do offer the promise of great success, and within Pakistan and India are highly educated Muslims who just might join the cause. Arab Al Qaeda never enlisted first-rate – or even second-rate – scientific talent. Pakistan and India, with vastly better educational establishments than the Arab world, might just provide what modern holy warriors have so far lacked: the requisite skill to deploy weapons of mass destruction against the United States.

Pakistan, indeed, has become one of the great battlegrounds of the Muslim civil war. It's not an Arab-only endeavor. Pakistan and Iran, the most dynamic laboratory of Islamic political thought, and post-Saddam Hussein Iraq are the guides to a better (or worse) future for believers. They are trying to rework the way modernity and religion have, so far, unsuccessfully married. They are trying to work democracy effectively into the faith, and with it the promise of less easily traumatized mores.

LFTC - Pakistan Visit: A Reporter's Journal

Cliff May, former NY Times reporter & founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, offers his report on his latest visit to Pakistan.  His 4-pager is a mixture, more downer than upper.  But he is a sharp reporter, so read his take closely.

LFTC - Pakistan: Big Doings Afoot

The New York Times reports that an unholy alliance of Taliban, al-Qaeda & other Islamist groups is stepping up a campaign to bring down the Pakistani government.

The following article is repirnted with permission from Stratfor:

Pakistan: The South Waziristan Migration

October 14, 2009

By Scott Stewart

Pakistan has been a busy place over the past few weeks. The Pakistani armed forces have been conducting raids and airstrikes against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other foreign Islamist fighters in Bajaur Agency, a district inside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), while wrapping up their preparations for a major military offensive into South Waziristan. The United States has conducted several successful missile attacks targeting militants hiding in areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border using unmanned aerial vehicles.

Threatened by these developments — especially the actions of the Pakistani military — the TTP and its allies have struck back. They have used larger, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) in attacks close to their bases in the Pakistani badlands to conduct mass-casualty attacks against soft targets in Peshawar and the Swat Valley. They have also used small arms and small suicide devices farther from their bases to attack targets in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the respective seats of Pakistan’s military and civilian power.

Initially, we considered devoting this week’s Security and Intelligence Report to discussing the tactical details of the Oct. 10 attack against the Pakistani army headquarters. But after taking a closer look at that attack, and the bigger mosaic it occurred within, we decided to focus instead on something that has not received much attention in the media — namely, how the coming Pakistani offensive in South Waziristan is going to have a heavy impact on the militants currently living and training there. In fact, we can expect the Pakistani offensive to cause a large displacement of militants. Of course, many of the militants who are forced to flee from South Waziristan, the epicenter of Pakistan’s insurgency, will likely land in areas not too far away — like Balochistan — but at least some of the militants who will be flushed out of South Waziristan will land in places far from Pakistan’s FATA and North-West Frontier Province.

The Coming Offensive

The Pakistani military has been preparing for the coming offensive into South Waziristan for months. They have positioned two divisions with some 28,000 troops for the attack, and this force will be augmented by paramilitary forces and local tribal militias loyal to Islamabad. As seen by the Pakistani offensives in Swat and Bajaur earlier this year, the TTP and its foreign allies are no match for the Pakistani military when it turns its full resources to address the problem.

The Pakistanis previously attempted a halfhearted offensive in South Waziristan in March of 2004 that only lasted 12 days before they fell back and reached a “negotiated peace settlement” with the militant leaders in the area. A negotiated peace settlement is a diplomatic way of saying that the Pakistanis attempted to pay off Pakistani Taliban leaders like Nek Mohammed to hand over the foreign militants in South Waziristan and stop behaving badly. The large cash settlements given to the militants did little to ensure peace and instead allowed the Taliban leaders to buy more weapons, pay their troops and essentially solidify their control in their areas of operation. The Taliban resumed their militant activities shortly after receiving their payments (though the most prominent leader, Nek Mohammed, was killed in a U.S. missile strike in June 2004).

This time, the South Waziristan offensive will be far different than it was in 2004. Not only do the Pakistanis have more than four times as many army troops committed to it, but the Pakistani military has learned that if it uses its huge airpower advantage and massed artillery, it can quickly rout any serious TTP resistance. In Bajaur, the Pakistanis used airstrikes and artillery to literally level positions (and even some towns) where the Taliban had tried to dig in and make a stand. Additionally, in January 2008, the Pakistani army conducted a successful offensive in South Waziristan called “Operation Zal Zala” (Earthquake) that made excellent progress and resulted in the loss of only eight soldiers in four days of intense fighting. This offensive was stopped only because Baitullah Mehsud and his confederates sued for peace — a truce that they quickly violated.

The lessons of past military operations and broken truces in South Waziristan, when combined with the recent TTP strikes against targets like the army headquarters, have served to steel the will of the government (and particularly the military). Pakistani government sources tell STRATFOR that they have the intent and the ability to “close the case for good.” This means that there should be no negotiated settlement with the TTP this time.

Of course, we are not the only people who can anticipate this happening. The TTP and others like the al Qaeda core leadership know all too well what happened in Bajaur and Swat. They have also been watching the Pakistani military prepare for the South Waziristan offensive for months now. The TTP leadership realizes that if they attempt to stand and fight the Pakistani military toe-to-toe they will be cut to shreds. Because of this, we believe that the TTP will adopt a strategy similar to that used by the Taliban in the face of overwhelming U.S. airpower following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, or that of the Iraqi military following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Rather than fight in set-piece conventional battles to the bitter end and be destroyed, after some initial resistance the TTP’s fighters will seek to melt away into the population and then conduct insurgent and terrorist strikes against the Pakistani military, both in the tribal regions and in Pakistan’s core regions. This is also the approach the TTP leadership took to the Pakistani offensive in Swat and Bajaur. They made noises about standing and fighting in places like Mingora. In the end, however, they melted away in the face of the military’s offensive and most of the militants escaped.

Contrary to popular perception, the area along the Afghan-Pakistani border is fairly heavily populated. The terrain is extremely rugged, but there are millions of Pakistanis living in the FATA, and many of them are extremely conservative and hostile toward the Pakistani government. This hostile human terrain poses perhaps a more significant obstacle to the Pakistani military’s operations to root out jihadists than the physical terrain. Accurate and current population numbers are hard to obtain, but the government of Pakistan estimated the population of South Waziristan to be nearly 500,000 in 1998, although it is believed to be much larger than that today. There are also an estimated 1.7 million Afghan refugees living on the Pakistani side of the border. This human terrain should enable many of the TTP’s Pashtun fighters to melt into the landscape and live to fight another day. Indeed, the militants are already heavily embedded in the population of South Waziristan, and the TTP and its rivals have controlled much of the area for several years now.

We have seen reports that up to 200,000 people have already fled areas of South Waziristan in anticipation of the coming military operation, and it is highly likely that some TTP fighters and foreign militants have used this flow of displaced people as camouflage to leave the region just as they did in Swat and Bajaur. Whether the coming offensive is as successful in destroying the TTP as our sources assure us it will be, the military action will undoubtedly force even more militants to leave South Waziristan.

The Camps

In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the many militant training camps run by al Qaeda and other organizations in Afghanistan were destroyed. Many of the foreign jihadists who were at these camps fled to Pakistan with the Taliban, though others fled to Iran, Iraq or elsewhere. This migration shifted the focus of jihadist training efforts to Pakistan, and South Waziristan in particular. Quite simply, there are thousands of foreign jihadists who have traveled to Pakistan to receive paramilitary training at these camps to fight in Afghanistan. A smaller number of the trainees have received advanced training in terrorist tradecraft, such as bombmaking, in the camps.

Due to the presence of these transplanted training installations, South Waziristan is “jihadist central,” with jihadists of all stripes based in the area. This confluence will complicate Islamabad’s attempts to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban elements. Both the good Taliban aligned with Islamabad that carry out their operations in Afghanistan and the bad Taliban fighting against Islamabad are based in South Waziristan, and telling the difference between the two factions on the battlefield will be difficult — though undoubtedly elements of Pakistani intelligence will attempt to help their Taliban friends (like the Haqqani network and Mullah Omar’s network) avoid being caught up in the coming confrontation.

There are literally thousands of Arab, Uzbek, Uighur, Chechen, African and European militants currently located in the Pakistani badlands, and a good number of them are in South Waziristan. Many of these foreigners are either teaching at or enrolled in the jihadist training camps. These foreigners are going to find it far harder to hide from the Pakistani military by seeking refuge in Afghan refugee camps or small tribal villages than their Pashtun brethren.

Some of these foreigners will attempt to find shelter in North Waziristan, or perhaps in more heavily — and more heterogeneously — populated areas like Quetta (Mullah Omar’s refuge) or Peshawar. Others may try to duck into the Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, but there is a good chance that many of these foreign militants will be forced to leave the Pakistan-Afghanistan area to return home or seek refuge elsewhere.

This exodus will have mixed results. On one hand it will serve to weaken the international jihadist movement by retarding its ability to train new jihadists until replacement camps can be established elsewhere, perhaps by expanding existing facilities in Yemen or Africa. On the other hand, it will force hundreds of people trained in terrorist tradecraft to find a new place to live — and operate. In some ways, this migration could mirror what happened after the number of foreign jihadist began to be dramatically reduced in Iraq — except then, many of the foreigners could be redirected to Pakistan for training and Afghanistan to fight. There is no comparable second theater now to attract these foreign fighters. This means that many of them may end up returning home to join insurgent movements in smaller theaters, such as Chechnya, Somalia, Algeria and Central Asia.

Those with the ability and means could travel to other countries where they can use their training to organize militant cells for terrorist attacks in much the same way the foreign fighters who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and left after the fall of the Soviet-backed government there went on to fight in places like Bosnia and Chechnya and formed the nucleus of al Qaeda and the current international jihadist movement.

The Next Generation

There is a big qualitative difference between the current crop of international fighters in South Waziristan and those who fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. During the earlier conflict, the foreigners were tolerated, but in general they were not seen by their Afghan counterparts as being particularly valiant or effective (though the Afghans did appreciate the cash and logistical help they provided). In many engagements the foreigners were kept out of harm’s way and saw very little intense combat, while in some cases the foreign fighters were essentially used as cannon fodder.

The perception of the foreigners began to change during the 1990s, and units of foreigners acquitted themselves well as they fought alongside Taliban units against the Northern Alliance. Also, following the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the foreign jihadists have proved themselves to be very effective at conducting terrorist attacks and operating in hostile territory.

In fact, over the past several years, we have witnessed a marked change in the ways the Afghan Taliban fight. They have abandoned some of their traditional armed assault tactics and have begun to employ al Qaeda-influenced roadside IED attacks and suicide bombings — attacks the Afghan fighters had previously considered “unmanly.” It is no mere coincidence that the number of suicide attacks and roadside IED attacks in Afghanistan increased dramatically after al Qaeda began to withdraw its forces from Iraq. There is also a direct correlation between the IED technology developed and used in Iraq and that now being employed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

All this experience in designing and manufacturing IEDs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan means that the jihadist bombmakers of today are more highly skilled than ever, and they have been sharing their experience with foreign students at training camps in places like South Waziristan. Furthermore, the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has provided a great laboratory in which jihadists can perfect their terrorist tradecraft. A form of “tactical Darwinism” has occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan as coalition firepower has weeded out most of the inept jihadist operatives. Only the strong and cunning have survived, leaving a core of hardened, competent militants. These survivors have created new tactics and have learned to manufacture new types of highly effective IEDs — technology that has already shown up in places like Algeria and Somalia. They have been permitted to impart the knowledge they have gained to another generation of young aspiring militants through training camps in places like South Waziristan.

As these foreign militants scatter to the four winds, they will be taking their skills with them. Judging from past waves of jihadist fighters, they will probably be found participating in future plots in many different parts of the world. And also judging from past cases, they will likely not participate in these plots alone.

As we have discussed in the past, the obvious weakness of the many grassroots jihadist cells that have been uncovered is their lack of terrorist tradecraft. They have the intent to do harm but not the ability, and many times the grassroots cells end up finding a government informant as they seek help acquiring weapons or constructing IEDs. When these inept “Kramer terrorists” manage to get linked up with a trained terrorist operative, they can cause considerable damage.

The possibility of these militants conducting attacks or bringing much-needed capability to grassroots cells means that the South Waziristan migration, which has almost certainly already begun, will give counterterrorism officials from Boston to Beijing something to worry about for the foreseeable future.

LFTC - Alfred Nobel: Life & Legacy

The Nobel Committee's website's Alfred Nobel webpage is well worth a visit.  Exploring its sub-pages yields numerous nuggets--the full story is well worth reading.  Here, for the time-pressed, are highlights.  Alfred Nobel was born in 1833 and died in 1896.  His father, Immanuel Nobel, originally built bridges, in which he used gunpowder to help.  But in mid-life he went to St. Petersburg, Russia to work for Tsar Nicholas I--the Tsar nicknamed "the cudgel" for his crushing the liberal Decembrist revolt upon taking power in 1825, establishing the Pale of Settlement in 1837 to confine Russia's Jews and starting the Crimean War in 1854, one year before (finally) he passed on.

Immanuel Nobel built gunpowder sea mines to thwart the British Royal Navy during the Crimean War by sealing off the Gulf of Finland.  Immanuel went into arms manufacture.  He moved his family to St. Petersburg and saw that his children received a classical education.  Alfred Nobel loved poetry, but became a chemist.  In Paris he met the inventor of nitroglycerine.  This subpage concisely explains how in 1867 Alfred Nobel invented dynamite to tame the volatile nitro, which was used in blasting rock for tunnels, canals & mining operations.  A prolific inventor, Nobel had 355 patents upon his death.

Alfred Nobel's will contains this clause establishing his eponymous awards and the applicable criteria:

"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiology or medical works by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not."

Let us separate the peace prize language from the rest of the clause:

"one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Put simply, this means preferring to award the prize to folks who go to big meetings, prattle on about world disarmament and peace and world government and the like.  The quintessential individual winner was Norman Angell (1872-1967), the Englishman who in 1910 wrote about how commerce had made war impossible in Europe.  Angell lived long enough too see two World Wars and more.  (Coincidentally, Claudia Rosett's latest Forbes column covers Nobel's life & legacy too; great minds think alike.)

And when did the Nobel Prize go to Angell?  The Norwegian Storting (parliament) awarded Angell the prize in 1933.  This was 15 years after the end of World War I., the war Angell said could not happen, that did and destroyed the flower of European youth.

And what else happened in 1933?  Fittingly for the obtuseness of peace activism everywhere, in 1933 German voters elected Adolf Hitler as their new leader.  Timing, as they say, is everything....

LFTC - Obama Misses Second Nobel!

MarketWatch reports that President Obama failed to win this year's Nobel Prize for Economics.  Here is a story on the actual economics prize winners.  But Bret Stephens has the biggest news: Looking at the Nobel Peace Prize's 108-year roster of winners, President Obama does in fact richly deserve his award.  44, writes Stephens, is "a perfect pick" in light of a long record--and not just in recent decades, as I had thought--of Nobel awards going to peaceniks, terrorists, blowhards, and others who fit what Oriana Fallaci called "Goodists"--do-gooders who do little good and carp at those who actually do good.  No peace prize for FDR, Churchill, Truman, nor for Ronald Reagan (Gorbachev got one).  Frank Kellog & Aristide Briand won it, the former for the 1928 eponymous pact that outlawed war as an instrument of national policy.  The Japanese signed that just two years before invading Manchuria.  Ex-Bush 43 speechwriter Michael Gerson notes polls showing that 71 percent of Europeans reject use of force to achieve justice, while 71 percent of Americans support the idea; the Nobel thus embodies Euro-pacifism, unbowed after history's bloodiest century.

While some notably deserving people--think Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa--have won, Stephens offers abundant evidence that 44 should mostly rue the company he now keeps.  My favorite awardee is the 1910 winner: an outfit called the Permanent International Peace Bureau--victorious just four years before Germany unleashed World War I!!!!  Read the Nobel Committee's narrative on the Bureau and savor: It notes that World War I "hindered" the Bureau's work and that "for technical & ideological reasons" World War Ii halted its work.  Wonder why....

But let us finish with an essay by Stratfor chief George Friedman, who argues that Europe's affection for Barack Obama is based upon the belief that unlike "cowboy" Presidents he will not take rash actions that threaten Europe's prosperity, and that Europe has awarded the prize to the Obama of their dreams, ignoring the twin wars Obama is entangled in and the risks he must inevitably take.

The essay below is reprinted with permission from Stratfor:

Nobel Geopolitics

Oct. 12, 2009

by George Friedman

U.S. President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prize, which was to be awarded to the person who has accomplished “the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the promotion of peace congresses.” The mechanism for awarding the peace prize is very different from the other Nobel categories. Academic bodies, such as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, decide who wins the other prizes. Alfred Nobel’s will stated, however, that a committee of five selected by the Norwegian legislature, or Storting, should award the peace prize.

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The committee that awarded the peace price to Obama consists of chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, president of the Storting and former Labor Party prime minister and foreign minister of Norway; Kaci Kullmann Five, a former member of the Storting and president of the Conservative Party; Sissel Marie Ronbeck, a former Social Democratic member of the Storting; Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, a former member of the Storting and current senior adviser to the Progress Party; and Agot Valle, a current member of the Storting and spokeswoman on foreign affairs for the Socialist Left Party.

The peace prize committee is therefore a committee of politicians, some present members of parliament, some former members of parliament. Three come from the left (Jagland, Ronbeck and Valle). Two come from the right (Kullman and Ytterhorn). It is reasonable to say that the peace prize committee faithfully reproduces the full spectrum of Norwegian politics.

A Frequently Startling Prize

Prize recipients frequently have proved startling. For example, the first U.S. president to receive the prize was Theodore Roosevelt, who received it in 1906 for helping negotiate peace between Japan and Russia. Roosevelt genuinely sought peace, but ultimately because of American fears that an unbridled Japan would threaten U.S. interests in the Pacific. He sought peace to ensure that Japan would not eliminate Russian power in the Pacific and not hold Port Arthur or any of the other prizes of the Russo-Japanese War. To achieve this peace, he implied that the United States might intervene against Japan.

In brokering negotiations to try to block Japan from exploiting its victory over the Russians, Roosevelt was engaged in pure power politics. The Japanese were in fact quite bitter at the American intervention. (For their part, the Russians were preoccupied with domestic unrest.) But a treaty emerged from the talks, and peace prevailed. Though preserving a balance of power in the Pacific motivated Roosevelt, the Nobel committee didn’t seem to care. And given that Alfred Nobel didn’t provide much guidance about his intentions for the prize, choosing Roosevelt was as reasonable as the choices for most Nobel Peace Prizes.

In recent years, the awards have gone to political dissidents the committee approved of, such as the Dalai Lama and Lech Walesa, or people supporting causes it agreed with, such as Al Gore. Others were peacemakers in the Theodore Roosevelt mode, such as Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger for working toward peace in Vietnam and Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin for moving toward peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Two things must be remembered about the Nobel Peace Prize. The first is that Nobel was never clear about his intentions for it. The second is his decision to have it awarded by politicians from — and we hope the Norwegians will accept our advance apologies — a marginal country relative to the international system. This is not meant as a criticism of Norway, a country we have enjoyed in the past, but the Norwegians sometimes have an idiosyncratic way of viewing the world.

Therefore, the award to Obama was neither more or less odd than some of the previous awards made by five Norwegian politicians no one outside of Norway had ever heard of. But his win does give us an opportunity to consider an important question, namely, why Europeans generally think so highly of Obama.

Obama and the Europeans

Let’s begin by being careful with the term European. Eastern Europeans and Russians — all Europeans — do not think very highly of him. The British are reserved on the subject. But on the whole, other Europeans west of the former Soviet satellites and south and east of the English Channel think extremely well of him, and the Norwegians are reflecting this admiration. It is important to understand why they do.

The Europeans experienced catastrophes during the 20th century. Two world wars slaughtered generations of Europeans and shattered Europe’s economy. Just after the war, much of Europe maintained standards of living not far above that of the Third World. In a sense, Europe lost everything — millions of lives, empires, even sovereignty as the United States and the Soviet Union occupied and competed in Europe. The catastrophe of the 20th century defines Europe, and what the Europeans want to get away from.

The Cold War gave Europe the opportunity to recover economically, but only in the context of occupation and the threat of war between the Soviets and Americans. A half century of Soviet occupation seared Eastern European souls. During that time, the rest of Europe lived in a paradox of growing prosperity and the apparent imminence of another war. The Europeans were not in control of whether the war would come, or where or how it would be fought. There are therefore two Europes. One, the Europe that was first occupied by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union still lives in the shadow of the dual catastrophes. The other, larger Europe, lives in the shadow of the United States.

Between 1945 and 1991, Western Europe lived in a confrontation with the Soviets. The Europeans lived in dread of Soviet occupation, and though tempted, never capitulated to the Soviets. That meant that the Europeans were forced to depend on the United States for their defense and economic stability, and were therefore subject to America’s will. How the Americans and Russians viewed each other would determine whether war would break out, not what the Europeans thought.

Every aggressive action by the United States, however trivial, was magnified a hundredfold in European minds, as they considered fearfully how the Soviets would respond. In fact, the Americans were much more restrained during the Cold War than Europeans at the time thought. Looking back, the U.S. position in Europe itself was quite passive. But the European terror was that some action in the rest of the world — Cuba, the Middle East, Vietnam — would cause the Soviets to respond in Europe, costing them everything they had built up.

In the European mind, the Americans prior to 1945 were liberators. After 1945 they were protectors, but protectors who could not be trusted to avoid triggering another war through recklessness or carelessness. The theme dominating European thinking about the United States was that the Americans were too immature, too mercurial and too powerful to really be trusted. From an American point of view, these were the same Europeans who engaged in unparalleled savagery between 1914 and 1945 all on their own, and the period after 1945 — when the Americans dominated Europe — was far more peaceful and prosperous than the previous period. But the European conviction that the Europeans were the sophisticated statesmen and prudent calculators while the Americans were unsophisticated and imprudent did not require an empirical basis. It was built on another reality, which was that Europe had lost everything, including real control over its fate, and that trusting its protector to be cautious was difficult.

The Europeans loathed many presidents, e.g., Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter was not respected. Two were liked: John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Kennedy relieved them of the burden of Dwight D. Eisenhower and his dour Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was deeply distrusted. Clinton was liked for interesting reasons, and understanding this requires examining the post-Cold War era.

The United States and Europe After the Cold War

The year 1991 marked the end of the Cold War. For the first time since 1914, Europeans were prosperous, secure and recovering their sovereignty. The United States wanted little from the Europeans, something that delighted the Europeans. It was a rare historical moment in which the alliance existed in some institutional sense, but not in any major active form. The Balkans had to be dealt with, but those were the Balkans — not an area of major concern.

Europe could finally relax. Another world war would not erase its prosperity, and they were free from active American domination. They could shape their institutions, and they would. It was the perfect time for them, one they thought would last forever.

For the United States, 9/11 changed all that. The Europeans had deep sympathy for the United States post-Sept. 11, sympathy that was on the whole genuine. But the Europeans also believed that former U.S. President George W. Bush had overreacted to the attacks, threatening to unleash a reign of terror on them, engaging in unnecessary wars and above all not consulting them. The last claim was not altogether true: Bush frequently consulted the Europeans, but they frequently said no to his administration’s requests. The Europeans were appalled that Bush continued his policies in spite of their objections; they felt they were being dragged back into a Cold War-type situation for trivial reasons.

The Cold War revolved around Soviet domination of Europe. In the end, whatever the risks, the Cold War was worth the risk and the pain of U.S. domination. But to Europeans, the jihadist threat simply didn’t require the effort the United States was prepared to put into it. The United States seemed unsophisticated and reckless, like cowboys.

The older European view of the United States re-emerged, as did the old fear. Throughout the Cold War, the European fear was that a U.S. miscalculation would drag the Europeans into another catastrophic war. Bush’s approach to the jihadist war terrified them and deepened their resentment. Their hard-earned prosperity was in jeopardy again because of the Americans, this time for what the Europeans saw as an insufficient reason. The Americans were once again seen as overreacting, Europe’s greatest Cold War-era dread.

For Europe, prosperity had become an end in itself. It is ironic that the Europeans regard the Americans as obsessed with money when it is the Europeans who put economic considerations over all other things. But the Europeans mean something different when they talk about money. For the Europeans, money isn’t about piling it higher and higher. Instead, money is about security. Their economic goal is not to become wealthy but to be comfortable. Today’s Europeans value economic comfort above all other considerations. After Sept. 11, the United States seemed willing to take chances with the Europeans’ comfortable economic condition that the Europeans themselves didn’t want to take. They loathed George W. Bush for doing so.

Conversely, they love Obama because he took office promising to consult with them. They understood this promise in two ways. One was that in consulting the Europeans, Obama would give them veto power. Second, they understood him as being a president like Kennedy, namely, as one unwilling to take imprudent risks. How they remember Kennedy that way given the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the coup against Diem in Vietnam is hard to fathom, but of course, many Americans remember him the same way. The Europeans compare Obama to an imaginary Kennedy, but what they really think is that he is another Clinton.

Clinton was Clinton because of the times he lived in and not because of his nature: The collapse of the Soviet Union created a peaceful interregnum in which Clinton didn’t need to make demands on Europe’s comfortable prosperity. George W. Bush lived in a different world, and that caused him to resume taking risks and making demands.

Obama does not live in the 1990s. He is facing Afghanistan, Iran and a range of other crisis up to and including a rising Russia that looks uncannily similar to the old Soviet Union. It is difficult to imagine how he can face these risks without taking actions that will be counter to the European wish to be allowed to remain comfortable, and worse, without ignoring the European desire to avoid what they will see as unreasonable U.S. demands. In fact, U.S.-German relations already are not particularly good on Obama’s watch. Obama has asked for troops in Afghanistan and been turned down, and has continued to call for NATO expansion, which the Germans don’t want.

The Norwegian politicians gave their prize to Obama because they believed that he would leave Europeans in their comfortable prosperity without making unreasonable demands. That is their definition of peace, and Obama seemed to promise that. The Norwegians on the prize committee seem unaware of the course U.S.-German relations have taken, or of Afghanistan and Iran. Alternatively, perhaps they believe Obama can navigate those waters without resorting to war. In that case, it is difficult to imagine what they make of the recent talks with Iran or planning on Afghanistan.

The Norwegians awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the president of their dreams, not the president who is dealing with Iran and Afghanistan. Obama is not a free actor. He is trapped by the reality he has found himself in, and that reality will push him far away from the Norwegian fantasy. In the end, the United States is the United States — and that is Europe’s nightmare, because the United States is not obsessed with maintaining Europe’s comfortable prosperity. The United States cannot afford to be, and in the end, neither can President Obama, Nobel Peace Prize or not.

LFTC - Afghan Reckoning: Pakistan Positioning

Afghanistan.  Henry Kissinger presents his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan.  He sees the need to engage neighboring countries--Pakistan, China, Russia--in a coalition.  How we can manage this is hard to see--Russia is on our case everywhere, China in Asia & the Pakistanis resent our increasing involvement inside Pakistan.  HK makes one solid point re counter-insurgency: Because securing the safety of the population is paramount--thus denying the friendly sea of sympathizers or cowed neutrals that guerrillas seek to swim & hide in, per Mao Zedong's rules (McChrystal & Co. fully understand this)--it is better to have 100 percent control of 75 percent of the country than 75 percent control of 100 percent of the country.  VP Joe Biden's counter-terror targeting from remote bases, without local troop presence, fails this test.  We cannot win support from locals who know that if they help us during the day and we leave, the Taliban will return that evening.  They simply will not give us the necessary battlefield intelligence to operate effectively otherwise.  Even then, we must find a way to train enough Afghans to step in, despite a corrupt government in Kabul.

Robert Kaplan warns that Obama courts disaster by being indecisive:

Even if Obama does end up making the correct decision on Afghanistan strategy (by which I mean adding troops, since counterinsurgency is manpower-intensive), the public agony over his deliberations may already have done incalculable damage. The Afghan people have survived three decades of war by hedging their bets. Now, watching a young and inexperienced American president appear to waiver on his commitment to their country, they are deciding, at the level of both the individual and the mass, whether to make their peace with the Taliban—even as the Taliban itself can only take solace and encouragement from Obama's public agonizing. Meanwhile, fundamentalist elements of the Pakistani military, opposed to the recent crackdown against local Taliban, are also taking heart from developments in Washington. This is how coups and revolutions get started, by the middle ranks sensing weakness in foreign support for their superiors.

Obama's wobbliness also has a corrosive effect on the Indians and the Iranians. India desperately needs a relatively secular Afghan regime in place to bolster Hindu India's geopolitical position against radical Islamdom, and while the country enjoyed an excellent relationship with bush, Obama's dithering is making it nervous. And Iran, in observing Washington's indecision, can only feel more secure in its creeping economic annexation of western Afghanistan. So, too, other allies far and wide—from the Middle East to East Asia, and Israel to Japan—will start to make decisions based on their understanding that Washington under Obama may not have their backs in a crisis. Again, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama only plays to such fears.

Policy debates are being influenced by two widely touted books on the Vietnam War: One stresses the mistake of getting in to a war without clear understanding of what lay ahead; the other stresses the need to meld strategy to political support.  Military historian Lewis Sorley explains how a shift to counterinsurgency strategy won the military phase of Vietnam, only to see Congress pull the plug on funding and let the North Vietnamese run over a weakened South; Sorley states that the South Vietnamese government was viable as well (quite possibly not true of the Karzai government today).  Peggy Noonan calls for a broader national debate on the war.

Jed Babbin sees 44 lacking not only the will to win but not seeing even the need to win, and believes ultimately he will choose an out; in this, JB writes, 44 is starkly at odds with his commander, General McChrystal.  The New York Times reports that America's civilian goals are unmet in Afghanistan, falling way short of cleaning up government, training police (the same problem that bedeviled us in Iraq).

Charles Krauthammer sees our President as "Young Hamlet" in a brilliant column.  CK details the administration's back-and-forth--and the Democrats' as well--and then frames the issue perfectly:

The White House began leaking an alternate strategy, apparently proposed (invented?) by Vice President Biden, for achieving immaculate victory with arm's-length use of cruise missiles, predator drones and special ops.

The irony is that no one knows more about this kind of warfare than Gen. McChrystal. He was in charge of exactly this kind of "counterterrorism" in Iraq for nearly five years, killing thousands of bad guys in hugely successful under-the-radar operations.

When the world's expert on this type of counterterrorism warfare recommends precisely the opposite strategy -- "counterinsurgency," meaning a heavy-footprint, population-protecting troop surge -- you have the most convincing of cases against counterterrorism by the man who most knows its potential and its limits. And McChrystal was emphatic in his recommendation: To go any other way than counterinsurgency would lose the war.

Yet his commander in chief, young Hamlet, frets, demurs, agonizes. His domestic advisers, led by Rahm Emanuel, tell him if he goes for victory, he'll become LBJ, the domestic visionary destroyed by a foreign war. His vice president holds out the chimera of painless counterterrorism success.

Against Emanuel and Biden stand David Petraeus, the world's foremost expert on counterinsurgency (he saved Iraq with it), and Stanley McChrystal, the world's foremost expert on counterterrorism. Whose recommendation on how to fight would you rely on?

Robert Kaplan, journalist-author extraordinaire, argues that America is trapped in Afghanistan into fighting a war it must win, but which will mostly benefit the regional powers, who are in essence free-riders on our efforts.  He adopts Ike's "Never fight a land war in Asia" motto:

In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.

Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.

Of course, one could make an excellent case that an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan is precisely what would lead to our decline, by demoralizing our military, signaling to our friends worldwide that we cannot be counted on and demonstrating that our enemies have greater resolve than we do. That is why we have no choice in Afghanistan but to add troops and continue to fight.

But as much as we hone our counterinsurgency skills and develop assets for the “long war,” history would suggest that over time we can more easily preserve our standing in the world by using naval and air power from a distance when intervening abroad. Afghanistan should be the very last place where we are a land-based meddler, caught up in internal Islamic conflict, helping the strategic ambitions of the Chinese and others.

The New York Times reported that Team Obama is leaning towards focusing on al-Qaeda and not the Taliban.  Seems that the "nice Taliban" theory of the Afghan War has a new lease on life.  That the Taliban were in cahoots with al-Qaeda from 1996 onward is judged no longer significant by the administration.  The Taliban provided, in effect, the "sea" in which al-Qaeda operatives swam, per Mao Zedong's classic formulation noted above.  Read the full article, which includes comments from key critics.  Fareed Zakharia argues that we should woo Pashtun tribesmen, and that we are not losing in Afghanistan but should focus on achievable, if modest, goals.

Pakistan.  Meanwhile, Pakistanis are objecting to increased US involvement, citing alleged compromise of the country's sovereignty because the Kerry-Lugar aid bill would require enhancing civilian power inside Pakistan at the expense of the military.

A Washington Times front-pager recounts how Pakistan blames the CIA for not sharing enough intelligence to enable more targeted attacks on terrorist leaders; the CIA, for its part, notes that in 2006 & 2007 the Pakistani ISI leaked intel to the Taliban, which the Pakistanis say will not happen anymore.  A Wall Street Journal front-pager reports that the Pakistan government plans a strong military response to the weekend Taliban assault that killed 20 Pakistani soldiers.  This may, the WSJ reports, exacerbate the rift between America & Pakistan over how best to fight the Taliban and whom to fight:

The attack is likely to accelerate plans for a Waziristan ground offensive the government has long warned is coming, say Pakistani civilian and military officials. "We are going to come heavy on you," Interior Minister Rehman Malik warned the Taliban in televised remarks.

But any offensive is likely to highlight the gap between Pakistan and the U.S. on how to deal with the Pakistan-based Taliban, the loose confederation of ethnic Pashtun militant groups that operates in rugged tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and often serves as a de facto government.

The U.S. has long advocated a broad crackdown on all Pakistan-based Taliban. Washington argues that the most powerful Taliban factions here are providing support to those fighting in Afghanistan against U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. The U.S. is currently considering a plan to deploy up to 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to counter the threat of the Taliban there.

Pakistan has taken a narrower approach. Even as an attack appears imminent against the Mehsud Taliban, Islamabad is seeking to renew peace deals with two other powerful Taliban factions in the country, say officials and tribal elders with ties to the militants.

Yesterday's suicide bombing that killed 41 more Pakistanis--the fourth terror attack in a single week--added fuel to the fire.

Bottom Line.  Great powers, especially those hemmed in by civilized values which limit use of lethal force, risk indefinite entanglement dealing with bloody-minded fanatics in far-flung corners.  Had they not attacked us we could--and should--ignore them.  But they did.  And we had to respond.  And we must find a way to get a tolerable outcome in Afghanistan, even if regional powers benefit far more than do we.

LFTC - Dear Honduras: Making Friends With Uncle Sam

Claudia Rosett has a classic column offering advice to Honduras on how to cultivate friends among Team Obama: (1) drop the constitutional democracy shtik; (2) start a nuclear program; (3) become a rogue proliferator; (4) incite Marxist or Islamist revolution.  Follow the examples set by Iran, North Korea, Russia, etc. and Hillary will push the reset button.  Read CR's spiffy, neat column in full.

Then read Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) in his Wall Street Journal op-ed on his Honduras visit.  The Senator states:

Indeed, the desire to move beyond the Zelaya era was almost universal in our meetings. Almost.

In a day packed with meetings, we met only one person in Honduras who opposed Mr. Zelaya's ouster, who wishes his return, and who mystifyingly rejects the legitimacy of the November elections: U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.

When I asked Ambassador Llorens why the U.S. government insists on labeling what appears to the entire country to be the constitutional removal of Mr. Zelaya a "coup," he urged me to read the legal opinion drafted by the State Department's top lawyer, Harold Koh. As it happens, I have asked to see Mr. Koh's report before and since my trip, but all requests to publicly disclose it have been denied.

On the other hand, the only thorough examination of the facts to date—conducted by a senior analyst at the Law Library of Congress—confirms the legality and constitutionality of Mr. Zelaya's ouster.

(DeMint notes: It's on the Internet here.)  The study is 11 pages.  Noteworthy is DeMint's comment that the State Department's legal adviser, Harold Koh, issued the legal opinion that our Ambassador to Honduras stated was justification for America's punitive policy towards the country.  Koh is a hard-line leftist whose legal reasoning is a weapon in the hands of America's adversaries.  He can be counted on, again & again, to issue such opinions.

LFTC - President Obama's Nobel Appeasement Prize

Begin with a multi-cartoon horse-laugh (literally) from The Weekly Standard Obama Nobel Peace Prize Parody.  But to be fair, the President himself admitted that he does not deserve the award.  Let us hope he really means that.

President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for: "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."  Such efforts include his global apology tour, sucking up to America's enemies, stiffing allies and waffling in the face of provocations by nuclear North Korea & nuclearizing Iran.

The Washington Post excerpted comments from the Nobel committee that show the grantors embracing every empty leftist cliche about peacemaking: dialogue to solve even the most difficult problems, promoting a vision of total nuclear disarmament, etc.  The quotes are scattered throughout the WP story, but are well worth reading.  NRO adds more detail & pungent comment.  The Wall Street Journal editors add detail, too.  The WSJ editors suggest also that Iranian dissidents sentenced to death for protesting the fraudulent elections last June get the award, which would be a fitting sequel to the 2004 prize given Shirin Ebadi.

Claudia Rosett, who notes other dubious recipients, sees the prize intended to influence 44 towards pursuing internationalist policies at the expense of American national interest.  On ABC News Sunday George Will said the the Nobel award suggests that "there is a cult, in which the President is a communicant, that is entirely detached from accomplishment"; Will called the Obama era as "a presentational Presidency."  John Bolton sees the Nobel as an "albatross" on 44's neck.  Mark Steyn "predicts" 44 will win Miss World next.  MS places the award in the broader context of Team Obama's goals:

But that was then and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, “War kills off great reform movements.” As the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues. Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

MS concludes:

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy — for America, and the world.

James Taranto's Best of the Web Friday entry has a great selection of quotes from right & left & from ordinary Americans.  JT notes: (a) ordinary Americans think achievement and not effort should be the yardstick; (b) it is liberals who were embarrassed.  Conservatives know that in recent decades the prize has often been politicized.  Thus liberal Ruth Marcus asks in her Washington Post column if 44 has received "a Nobel for a Good Two Weeks?"

RM writes:

“Mom!” my 12-year-old yelled from the kitchen. “President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize!”

I told her she had to be mistaken.

This is ridiculous -- embarrassing, even. I admire President Obama. I like President Obama. I voted for President Obama. But the peace prize? This is supposed to be for doing, not being -- and it’s no disrespect to the president to suggest he hasn’t done much yet. Certainly not enough to justify the peace prize.

"Extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples?” “[C]aptured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future?” Please. This turns the award into something like pee-wee soccer: everybody wins for trying.

Peggy Noonan sees "a wicked and ignorant" award.  PN writes that it damages the award for a generation, and calls it an award by liberals for liberals.  She has thoughts for Obama's acceptance address:

For instance: The Peace Prize judges won't see it this way, but America has gone to Europe twice in the past century to fight for peace. This is an old concept, and has to do with killing killers so they can't kill anymore. It cost America a lot to do this, and we kept no territory, as they say, beyond the graves where our soldiers lie. America then taxed itself and gave its wealth not only to its allies but to its former adversaries, to help them rebuild. We didn't actually have to do this. We did it to make the world better. We did it to foster peace. (They should give us a prize.)

America hasn't just helped the world, it literally lit the world with its inventions, which are the product of its freedoms. The lights under which the Peace Prize judges read, and rejected, the worthy nominations? Why, those lights were invented by an American. The emails the committee members sent to each other, sharing their banal insights on leadership? They came through the Internet. Who invented the Internet? It was a Norwegian bureaucrat with a long face and hair on his nose and little plastic geometric eyeglasses? Oh wait, it was Americans. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are healthy because they have been inoculated against diseases such as polio. Who invented the polio vaccine, an enfeebled old leftist academic in Oslo? Nah, it was a man named Jonas Salk. He was an American.

Europe's elites experience Mr. Obama as a historical accident that needs and deserves their encouragement. Actually he was elected with 69.5 million votes, and you know, they were cast by Americans. Go figure.

Mr. Obama should get the spotlight off himself and put it on the great thing that yielded him up and made him possible. America is misunderstood these days, and he could perform a public service by helping people understand it better.

Love, after all, never harms the world, and as an added practical bonus such a speech would obscurely embarrass the committee, which won't be able to criticize the thoughts of its hero. That would be pleasurable for Americans, and therefore helpful to Mr. Obama.

This might to some degree redeem this wicked and ignorant award, this mischievous honor.

Bottom Line.  What makes this award not only silly but dangerous is that it will inevitably feed the fantasies of our President that he is a world transformational, messianic figure who is uniquely gifted with the ability ot bring about world peace.  It will confirm that his current path of appeasement--which Obama sees as peacemaking--is the correct one.  It will inflate an ego that already is hyper-inflated, and deepen illusions of super-competence that the President fancies he possesses.  Iran's murderous mullahs could hardly have hoped for a better gift.

President Obama joins such hallowed peace recipients as Le Duc Tho (for signing a treaty--the 1973 Paris Accords-- his country, North Vietnam, never intended to keep & did not keep) & Yasser Arafat (for signing a treaty--the 1993 Oslo Accords--he never intended to honor & did not honor).  Add Kofi Annan, who won whilst embroiled in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal.  Would you like to be in such company?